Deadline: Murals and menace at Mark Balsillie birthday dinner at The Cullen

Mark Balsillie is a bikie who likes the finer things in life, and while police may have seized his Lamborghini, they can’t take away his appreciation of fine art and cuisine.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Bikies go bougie

There was a good turn out — including cops — for the birthday of bikie gang strongman Mark Balsillie at the weekend.

Word reaches Deadline that the big event was held in a penthouse and at the rooftop bar of the Cullen Hotel in Prahran, a five-star joint with sweeping views to the city.

“Daring and unique, The Cullen is inspired by and features lashings of original artwork and prints by Australian contemporary artist, Adam Cullen,” its website said.

It was already well established that Balsillie, reportedly now with the Finks MC, is a man who enjoys the finer things in life.

Echo Taskforce detectives seized a Lamborghini Huracan coupe valued at close to $500,000 from him during raids back in 2020.

The Cullen Hotel, South Yarra.

Anyway, his guests into the early hours of Saturday morning included Toby Mitchell and other identities from Melbourne’s underworld.

Apparently, everyone had a good time, the only dampener being the arrival of a large number of police late in the evening.

A Victoria Police spokeswoman confirmed members were called to a Commercial Rd venue at 1am Saturday after a noise complaint.

“The occupants were asked to vacate the room and left after discussions with police,” she said.

Of course, Balsillie and Mitchell have certainly negotiated much worse situations over the years, as members of Melbourne’s gangland ambush survivors club.

Balsillie was shot multiple times in a 2017 attack in inner Melbourne while Mitchell almost died when riddled with bullets outside the Bandidos MC clubhouse in Brunswick back in 2011.

The pair later spent time with the Mongols outlaw motorcycle gang but that came to an abrupt end after a period of regime change in 2022.

Mongols bikies Toby Mitchell and Mark Balsillie at the Melbourne Pavilion boxing event

Dumb and dumber

If there were 10 Commandments of fugitive life, surely staying off socials while running from the law would be right up there.

What is the point of getting out of Dodge ahead of the posse if you don’t disconnect in the interests of your own freedom?

Deadline noticed just such a case last week. It concerns a couple of gangster types who went on a short-notice holiday after some gunplay in the suburbs.

No one got hurt but it was more than enough to attract the police, particularly given the background of at least one of the pair.

Within days there were some online images of the boys relaxing in a cosy apartment.

That might have been stupid enough but the picture gave a strong lead on the location of their accommodation.

There, on a small coffee table behind them were some helpful brochures on local attractions. One was for a popular pub a short drive from where they were staying.

No surprise that the pair of geniuses are currently back in custody. Maybe the main players in the item below should take note before they end up in the same predicament.

Don’t be so rude

Great news for a veteran Melbourne crime figure who, it seems, got bail over some high-level firearms offending recently.

As is customary at such hearings, much evidence was led explaining how he is the kind of solid citizen one day destined to appear on the Australia Day Honours list.

Thankfully, the court didn’t hear about the email written in a foreign language which he sent to Deadline a while back.

When we were eventually able to figure out how to translate the ramblings, they were found to contain threats to our “personal safety.”

All that’s been put in the past but it is to be hoped authorities this time don’t miss their chance to send him back to a place where everyone will understand what he’s saying without a translator.

Easey Street continued

It’s true we have more violent home invasions and high-speed chases and arsons these days — but the murder rate when Easey St happened in 1977 was more than double what it is now.

In fact, a relatively small homicide squad in a much smaller police force handled up to 100 unlawful deaths a year in Victoria at a time when it had maybe half the population it does now.

As one of the original Easey St detectives recalls, within a day or so of the two women’s bodies being discovered at their Collingwood house, his crew was called to a bikie shooting and had to juggle three investigations at a time.

Police and media outside Easey Street in 1977. Picture: ABC News

Back then, if a case couldn’t be solved with a confession, an interrogation or “smoking gun” evidence, it was hard going for investigators. Forensic evidence was limited mainly to fingerprints, blood type or ballistics. DNA was science fiction and so was the mobile phone tracing that now solves so many serious crimes.

What has not changed is the value of alert police.

It turns out that the young uniformed constable who stopped and questioned the teenage Perry Kouroumblis days after the Easey St murders, and handed the youth’s knife to the homicide squad, made an arrest two weeks earlier that seemed equally interesting at the time.

That policeman was the same young Ron Iddles, later to become a successful homicide detective. The killer he picked up in Collingwood that month was Neil Roland Bugg, who had no teeth and a terrible temper.

EMBARGO 15 MARCH 2019: HOMICIDE DETECTIVE RON IDDLES STARS IN THE GOOD COP. PICTURE: FOXTEL

Mark “Chopper” Read told Deadline he knew Bugg in jail, where fellow prisoners were wary of the volatile “Buggsy”. They avoided waking him up because he would leap up and attack. Many prisoners believed Bugg had done the Easey St murders — and had been overlooked because of being arrested for another murder around the same time: supposedly a case of hiding in plain sight, according to Read.

Read’s story fitted some facts. At 4am on January 1, 1977, the young Ron Iddles was first to a strange scene in Wellington St, Collingwood. A station wagon had run off the road because a back-seat passenger had cut the driver’s throat with a broken bottle.

The dead man was Peter Phillip Fergeus, a labourer from Epping. The vigilant Iddles noticed blood on an onlooker’s feet and told detectives. The onlooker was Bugg, alias “Lester Hargreaves”.

Bugg, 25, was interviewed but released before the Easey St murders of January 10. He was arrested in Brisbane two weeks later, on January 23, and extradited to face charges of murdering Fergeus. It’s possible but unlikely he was asked to prove he wasn’t in Melbourne on the night of the Easey St murders.

Read’s old jailhouse story was passed to detectives about 2008. Investigators set up a discreet operation to obtain Bugg’s DNA to check against the Easey St sample. As with the handful of other “persons of interest” tested up until then, it did not match.

That discreet operation to obtain DNA was almost certainly a “routine” roadside breath test — which, of course, would provide a saliva sample. Then again, it might have come from a cigarette butt or a coffee cup. Any one of such techniques might have been used to obtain an initial DNA sample from a relative of the man now in custody in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, making him the strongest suspect in 47 years.