Deadline: Marrogi tribute tattoo doesn’t wash with Crown

Young crim Jesse Marrogi’s love of Crown is clear given its brand is etched in ink across his back, but it seems the feeling isn’t mutual.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest scallywag scutt

Marrogi out of casino? You can bet on it

Jesse Marrogi’s love of Crown Casino is clear, but word is the feeling isn’t mutual.

The Herald Sun last week revealed a striking tattoo of the Southbank gambling mecca which takes pride of place on Marrogi’s back.

It probably wasn’t the kind of promotion Crown needs, given the venue’s dramas with various authorities in recent times.

The tatt sits beneath the words “crime pays” and among images of a police car, a Rolls Royce and $100 bills.

That’s gangsta, but Deadline has been told Marrogi has for some time been on a long list of individuals not welcome at Crown.

Jesse Marrogi’s tribute to Crown.

A tattoo across the back of a young crim probably in’t the kind of promotion Crown needs. Picture: David Crosling

Jesse’s big brother George won’t be getting the red carpet treatment any time soon, either.

It’s believed a punch-on he and others had with the late Nabil Maghnie some years ago was so brutal it won’t be forgotten for a long, long time.

“It was as good a fight as you’ve seen. They went hammer and tongs,” one source said.

George was made persona non grata after that and, in any case, is stuck in the other big house over the 2016 murder of crime identity Kadir Ors at Campbellfield Plaza.

His bad blood with Maghnie reputedly wasn’t confined to the Southbank precinct.

In the same year, Maghnie was shot in the head as he sat in his car at a still-unknown location, managing to return fire on the would-be killer

Rather than burden our state’s notoriously stretched ambulance service, Maghnie drove himself to hospital in a critical condition but somehow pulled through.

Police have long suspected Marrogi was responsible for that ambush.

Sex, drugs and violence but no betting?

Footballers behaving badly is nothing new. A punch-on here, a white powder there, the odd sexual assault — but now there are bizarre allegations of sky-high gambling that make the former lapses of (now reformed) punters Fevola and Schwarz look like Sunday School kids.

Rumour mongers in police circles suggest one football identity is such a degenerate gambler he owes more than a million dollars to bad guys. He is so desperate to get square, the gossip goes, that he supposedly arranged a bizarre “spot bet” that his team’s ruckman would bounce the ball during a game, something the beanstalk hasn’t done for years.

Sadly for those spreading this rumour, it didn’t happen. As one sceptical football fan said later, in order to bounce the ball, the player in question would first have to hold it for more than a second.

Greg Brazel coped some brutal treatment over his phone. Picture: Jessica Lee

The bottom line

There have long been issues with phones getting into prison.

It’s more than two decades since Greg “Bluey” Brazel wound up getting some brutal treatment from other prisoners, amid friction over control of his mobile.

That ended with Brazel being busted-up and those who attacked him making quite a spectacle in the so-called Trial of the Century.

Deadline has been told one heavy gangland figure had in the not too distant past been keeping his phone under serious wraps.

We’ll spare you the details, but the Al Capone was very small and tucked right away in something of a backdoor operation.

“It was in a bit of a black spot,” one observer remarked recently.

It’s hardly surprising that a phone would be such a valuable commodity in the clink.

Contact with the outside world is highly regulated and a man with a multimillion-dollar business to run might find such rules really cramp his style.

Appetite for crime-busting

Taking on the gang menace she says plagues Brighton has clearly been hungry work for Bec Judd.

The influencer took to Instagram last week after sampling the new KFC Zinger burger, which now features cabbage rather than lettuce.

“Can confirm the Zinger Burger is still #fucyum even with cabbage,” she wrote to her 788,000 drooling followers.

KFC has been forced to ditch lettuce because the vegetable has reached astronomical prices and is barely affordable, even in places like Bayside.

Bec Judd went in to bat for the cabbage laced Zingers.

Crime, honours and two Peter Wards

Apart from the odd white-collar shonk scamming his or her way into a gong, there’s not much crime news in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

But, this time around, an award has been pinned to a Ward. That would be Peter John Ward, Deadline’s favourite criminal lawyer, who got the OAM for being a scrupulously honest broker in the tricky business of defending crooks who sometimes tell porkies, steal property and inflict violence.

Peter Ward came to work in crime a lifetime ago when unexpectedly offered a job by the late and once great Frank Galbally, in his heyday the most famous and flamboyant defence lawyer in the land.

Galbally ran to Rolls Royces and a courtroom persona that was part Hollywood, part Collingwood and a lot Holy Roman Empire.

The man that crooks called “Mr Frank” had a genius for picking God-fearing juries and then playing to them, and managed to win acquittals for dozens of people accused of murder.

As Galbally’s dedicated sidekick, Ward inherited his mentor’s fierce loyalty to defending the underdog but did it totally without the theatrics. His shrewd and humane advocacy is respected by alleged villains, police, judges and magistrates, not to mention grateful clients.

Whenever Deadline reporters are arrested, Peter Ward has been our lawyer of choice.

Potential clients should not mix him up with Peter Ward, the police superintendent who scored the Australian Police Medal on Monday for working the other side of the fence.

He’s no smartie

Surely this bloke must be one of the most distinctively dressed crime suspects ever.

Police have been looking for the fashionista in a red tracksuit with a bold Skittles confectionery after an alleged break-in at a Somerville laundrette on May 19.

They say he sat on a couch inside the business for a short time

The man promoting the lolly allegedly then went off his trolley, getting up and kicking the front window, smashing it.

Police appealed for public assistance to help identify a distinctively dressed man after a window was broken at a Somerville laundrette.

High on a roof

A Melbourne carjacking suspect was clearly made of sterner stuff — or on harder stuff — than most of us.

The 36-year-old allegedly spent 13 hours on the roofs of houses to dodge police one icy night last week.

He had allegedly pushed a rider off his motorcycle in Sunshine before heading off to St Albans.

There he went from roof to roof until the novelty, or something else, wore off.

Lengthy negotiations ended when he accepted the offer of a ladder and was arrested.