Deadline: Cost of living crunch comes for crimes as gun prices soar on Melbourne’s streets

Even crims can’t escape Victoria’s cost of living crunch, with a firearm crackdown by police seeing the price of some semiautomatic handguns jump by $15,000.

Crooks who fancy being tooled up are facing severe cost of living pressures.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Gun prices up with a bullet

Gangster talk is cheap and wholesale cocaine is flooding the market but guns are a different matter. Illegal ones, that is.

Black market prices are outstripping the consumer price index and inflation so fast that if guns were legitimate investments, they’d be getting stacked in vaults with vintage wine and collectable paintings.

As it stands, crooks who fancy being tooled up are facing severe cost of living pressures.

It’s hardly an exact science because it’s not regulated but some say that certain firearms now bring five times as much on the black market as they did a decade ago.

Deadline can recall the amazement in times past when insiders suggested that high-end semiautomatic handguns (such as the Glocks used by some state police forces) would fetch from $3000 to $5000 apiece on the street.

Now, we’re told, the same firearms would fetch upwards of $20,000. That means that they are not yet literally worth their weight in gold (about $66,000 on current gold prices) but far more than silver (about $1000).

Why is it so?

Being gangster is not as easy as it used to be.

Strangely, according to some, one reason for inflated prices is the introduction of firearm prohibition orders. These make the risk of keeping a gun too great for many players because they can be searched without warrant any time and, if sprung, will face long jail terms.

But the tough laws arguably shrink the market and so lessen the supply of illicit guns smuggled in or manufactured by backyard gunsmiths who reputedly use lathes and 3-D printers to make up the parts they can’t import by post. The short-term result: those already in circulation are getting more scarce.

Those diehards willing to hang onto their weapons, or to get someone else to carry them, aren’t interested in selling, so prices rise. At last until the market “corrects” itself. That’s the theory, anyhow. Economics was never Deadline’s strong point.

The current volatility in organised crime circles is another part of the puzzle. Since early August, underworld figures Mohammed “Afghan Ali” Keshtiar, Gavin “Capable” Preston and Robert Issa have been shot dead in unrelated underworld slayings.

There has also been the tobacco war friction which has resulted in the torching of smoke shops, a number of non-fatal shootings and (probably) the Keshtiar ambush.

One Deadline source who knows his guns said those who killed Comanchero associate Issa at Craigieburn a couple of weeks ago had no trouble getting their hands on fatal firepower.

He said images from the scene showed two guns had been used, one of them a .45 calibre “hand cannon.” Along the lines of Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum, at least in regards to what experts call muzzle velocity.

Art for art’s sake? no chance

Speaking of illegal investments, shady investors too nervous to dabble in black market guns or to speculate on bargain cocaine — down to $150,000 a “brick” from a high of $380,000 — might like to look into the secretive world of art fraud.

Art rorts, of course, have always been around. The rorters rely on the legitimate art market and relatively honest art dealers and trusting buyers who prop up the game by throwing cash at fashionable art works, or art they think will become fashionable if certain artists die.

At best, art dealing and collecting is a form of gambling.

At worst, it leaves buyers open to the sorts of colourful art identities who brought us the Brett Whiteley scandal in recent years, not to mention a market saturated with questionable “Aboriginal art” pumped out by all sorts of scallywags, some of them with rollers fitted with “dot points” to speedily paint the dots that is the signature style of much indigenous art.

Brett Whitley was said to occasionally to sell or swap art for cash or drugs.

The beauty of Whiteley for rorters was that his works are so recognisable and collectable — and that he was a heroin addict reputed occasionally to sell or swap art for cash or drugs to feed his habit. This created the potential for previously “unknown” works to appear every now and again after his death by overdose in 1992.

The same might be said of the late Melbourne artist Howard Arkley, whose output of suburban streetscapes didn’t die when he did, also of a heroin overdose, in 1999. A few extra Arkleyesque paintings kept bobbing up.

The man at the centre of the Whiteley scandal, which hit the courts in 2015, is one time Geelong dentist’s son Peter Gant, who has relatives and associates all around the district.

One such innocent soul is said to have quite a few interesting-looking paintings in a shed on a property down that way.

Would those be genuine originals or something that just looks that way, controlled by an absentee operator waiting for the right time to slide them onto the art market? Hard to say. Meanwhile, they’re just hangin’ around down on the farm with the birds and the bees and the flies and the fleas.

Speaking of fleas, Gant is recalled by Geelong College old boys as the sharp lad who ran an SP book at school. Contemporaries say he always had a weakness for the punt, preferably with other people’s money.

The Whiteley scandal is not the only one laid at the Gant door. He is, in his way, an artist also. What the Americans call a BS artist.

It’s extremely long odds that Stephen Dank and James Hird would’ve reminisced about old times in the airport bar. Picture. Phil Hillyard

The friendly skies

A friend of this column flew north to the Harbour City last week and found himself seated nearby passenger Stephen Dank on the flight.

Dank became famous a decade ago as the sports scientist (or should that be “sports scientist”?) behind the Essendon supplements scandal. He achieved further notoriety, a bit later, as a drive-by shooting victim.

After disembarking, our source walked through the terminal and one of first people he saw was none other than former Bombers coach James Hird.

It would be long odds against Dank and Hird sharing a couple of sherbets in the lounge while they relived old times.

Their former associate at Essendon, sometime rodeo rider Dean “The Weapon” Robinson, recently burst into print in a national magazine to put his side of one of football’s strangest stories.

Bang bang bungle ends in blood

It really pays to know what you’re doing when carting a gun around to put the frighteners on people.

One reptile found this out the hard way recently when he paid an unfriendly visit to a house out in the suburbs.

After putting a hole in his manners, he put a hole in his body during the trip home when the weapon discharged by accident.

Word is, he’ll survive. Proof that Charles Darwin was wrong. Sometimes the stupidest survive.

Stick and berries and all

Those who work at Victoria Police’s fancy Spencer St headquarters see all sorts of unusual things in the course of the daily grind.

It comes with the territory, so to speak. But they got more than they bargained for last week, copping an eyeful of full frontal.

Parading around in a swank apartment balcony opposite for an extended period was a naked resident who didn’t care what the law saw as he tried to take advantage of some warm spring weather and catch some rays.

“It was the full stick and berries,” our source reports.

Life and Crimes and Times (oh my)

The spotlight was on Deadline’s own Andrew Rule this week, as he sat down with crime reporter Olivia Jenkins to talk about the fine art of crime reporting.

The chat was part of a mini series within Andrew’s long-running podcast series Life and Crimes.

The appropriately-titled Life and Times discusses some of the biggest stories Andrew has covered, along with the dilemmas facing those humble scribes who ply their trade writing about the shady side of the street.

You can hear it all on the life and crimes podcast feed, or if you’re a subscriber, you can listen to extended versions on the Herald Sun mobile app