Deadline: Firebombing can’t stop Melbourne’s most resilient business

This Pascoe Vale tobacco store wouldn’t let something as commonplace as a car smashing through their front wall and a firebombing attack stop them from serving their local community.

The Gaffney St store was reduced to a charred shell on December 1. Picture: David Crosling

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Can’t keep a good trade down

Say what you like about Melbourne’s tobacco trade but there’s no doubt those who run it are determined.

Eight days ago, a car was driven into the front of a Gaffney St, Pascoe Vale, tobacconist, and set alight by arsonists.

The joint looked ruined and a vast amount of stock was wrecked, the type of setback which might ordinarily bring a business to its knees for some time.

But that’s not how things work in the smoke caper and barely a day was wasted before the place was up and running again.

Temporary timber walls went up, along with what little signage had been salvaged and — for the removal of any doubt — the words “WE’RE OPEN” was spray-painted over the front.

The shop’s grand reopening just days later.

Of course, this probably points to more than just the operators’ get-up-and-go spirit.

It also demonstrates the kind of colossal profits that are up for grabs in a sector where there is inexhaustible demand from smokers keen to get their nicotine fix at under half-price.

The fact that a shop can be restocked so quickly might also again show the vast amount of product the big players have tucked away.

Deadline recalls how the anti-organised crime Lunar taskforce cleaned out a western suburbs shop in a raid about a year ago.

It was back up and running within days, customers pouring in to a fully restocked business.

Police on the scene of the attack. Picture: David Crosling

Even cleanskins have dodgy elders

You can choose your friends but not your relatives. That thought must cross the mind of shiny young lawyer Jidah Clark, whose recent inclusion on the First Nations Treaty Authority unfortunately coincides with his father Geoff “Borer” Clark’s conviction and jailing over systematic theft of nearly a million bucks from Indigenous bodies that Clark dominated and bullied for years. Not to mention lying about it under oath.

The good news for the Treaty Authority is that Jidah, Clark’s squeaky clean younger son, is not just a handsome dude but street smart as well as book savvy.

The Clark boys didn’t just hit the law books, they learned how to handle themselves with the heavy punching bag hanging on the back verandah at the Framlingham community that Borer ruled with an iron fist until he hit the slammer.

Still, jail runs in the family. Clark did time as a young thug and his biological father was a Scottish-born standover man known as “Ginger” Macintosh, who served time in Pentridge Prison way back and was well-known in painter and docker circles.

Geoff Clark arrives at the County Court of Victoria. Picture: Tamati Smith.

At Pentridge, “Ginger” the Glasgow gunman preceded the deadly Amos Atkinson, who did time in H Division with his friend “Chopper” Read, “Keithy George”, Jimmy Loughnan, “Bluey” Brazel and other colourful jailhouse characters in the 1970s.

The late Amos, well-known to Deadline for his wide-ranging achievements in the armed robbery and stand-over sector, was a proud Yorta Yorta and Afghan man with many relatives around the Shepparton area. These include the excellent Dr Petah Atkinson, a respected medical professional and academic who joins Jidah Clark and other fine people on the Treaty Authority.

Jidah’s big brother Jeremy Clark can’t get picked for the Treaty team at this point because he, too, was convicted of embezzling lotsa money, mainly to fund lawyers.

In the interests of full disclosure, Deadline must confess knowing (and admiring) the late Alick Jackomos, father of Andrew Jackomos, a key position player in the Treaty Authority team. His dad Alick, born in Melbourne to Greek parents, was everything that Geoff Clark isn’t, apart from the fact they both fought in Jimmy Sharman’s travelling boxing tent. He spent his life helping others.

The Treaty Authority has been a long time coming. Back in 2001, when Geoff Clark first raged against public accusations that he had raped several women, including his first cousin Joanne McGuinness, he cruised around in late-model luxury car with customised number plates that read TREATY.

Perhaps not the image the current cleanskin line-up wants to promote. A cleansing ceremony might be in order.

Follow the money

“Borer” Clark and Son didn’t have the embezzlement and fraud caper to themselves, of course. The late John Adams, suburban solicitor and AFL behind-the-scenes powerbroker, was up to no good for nearly as long as Clark was.

When Adams suddenly departed this earth last year the balloon went up immediately: it seems he’d siphoned off some $100m of money invested with him, supposedly to lend out as mortgage loans for house buyers.

John Bernard Adams.

The victims were many, but most came from the football and racing circles Adams frequented, including bookmakers.

The Adams law office in Ivanhoe has been shuttered and the family has kept an extremely low profile, which is hardly surprising, given that a group of aggrieved investors are seeking court action to recover something from what they rightly call a Ponzi scheme.

It’s good to see that despite the shadow of looming legal action, Adams’ long-suffering law partner Shane Maguire hasn’t lost his zest for life. There he was, enjoying himself with fellow racegoers on a table in the Matilda Room at the booming Jericho Cup race meeting at Warrnambool last Sunday.

The lamb cutlets and chicken were excellent, the champagne and chardonnay were chilled and anyone who backed local trainers finished well ahead. Unlike Adams’ long list of trusting clients.

Maguire has denied any knowledge of Adams’ embezzlement.

River man and buried treasure

Enigmatic Romanian-born Gelu Nicolae Pucea was the subject of a detailed read in last weekend’s Sunday Herald Sun.

Pucea, who dubbed himself “Nick the River Man” is known in East Gippsland for cannabis cultivation which, while highly skilled and organised, has twice seen him busted and jailed.

He is mostly recalled as a friendly but flashy bloke who caused no trouble around his adopted home town of Bruthen.

But, if the rumours are true, someone in them there hills knew a bit about what the River Man had been up to in the Tambo Valley.

Talk has circulated for years that plastic barrels stuffed with his cannabis profits were once buried around his property.

Gelu Nicolae Pucea aka “Nick the River Man” outside Bairnsdale Court.

There is also talk that a local might have quickly got busy with a digger hoping to hit the jackpot after Nick’s first arrest in 2004.

Someone else was found inside his home pulling the walls apart in search of something, once he was in custody.

It might not have happened if Pucea had been at home.

One source recalls his cool intervention in a ruckus among prisoners in the cells after his first arrest.

Pucea lost patience with the group and approached them quietly.

“He whispered something to them and they never put a foot wrong after that. As polite as he was, he was measured,” the source said.

There were also accounts of scary Copperhead Road-style run-ins with a mystery man in an area where Pucea was doing his horticultural best.

Vale Bluey fountain

When Ian Fountain, better known as “Bluey,” joined the police force in 1962 he was a mature man who’d already spent a good 12 years working hard, mostly on the family property at Lindenow, east of Bairnsdale. He became an astute and respected policeman and rose to rank of detective chief inspector before retiring late last century.

The old farm boy was as wise as a tree full of owls. When a posse of trigger-happy armed robbery detectives shot unarmed robber Graeme Jensen in his car outside a mower shop at Narre Warren in 1988, Fountain was apparently trusted by the Police Association to sort out some key facts.

Given that he was something of a firearms expert, the story goes, he was quietly sent by the Association to check over Jensen’s car to make sure bullet holes tallied with statements from those accused the ambush shooting of the prolific armed robber, which had triggered the Walsh St murders of two young policemen.

The story goes that Fountain, armed with a pencil, poked it in the holes to ascertain which direction they had been aimed and, possibly, the calibre and such like. He satisfied himself that the official story stacked up well enough for the police union to risk its members’ hard-earned funds to defend the accused, who all walked.

Whatever the truth of that story and others, he can’t answer questions now. Bluey Fountain died last week, aged 91. Which means very very few of the East Gippsland “nashos” are left who were sent to Puckapunyal Army Camp when they turned 18 in 1951.

Unhappy trails

A show-off St Albans motorcyclist may have been operating on one brain cell as well as one wheel last week.

The rider was out and about on a trail-bike when he popped a mono right in front of Brimbank highway patrol officers at the McIntyre Rd entry to the Western Ring Rd.

He then allegedly took off along the freeway at up to 130km/h and refused to stop for an attempted interception on the Western Ring Rd.

Things turned bad for the 20-year-old from Pakenham when he decided to cross railway tracks at Coleraine St and got himself stuck.

He tried to bolt and was quickly arrested.