Deadline: Revenge served cold at prestigious Melbourne tennis club

Decades after being targeted by a bully, Stan is a committee member of a Melbourne tennis club, where his ex-tormentor — now a prominent figure — suddenly applied for membership.

It took 40 years, but Stan finally got his revenge at a suburban tennis club.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

DON’T GET ANGRY, GET EVEN

Revenge is, they say, the dish best eaten cold.

Carl Williams, whose murderous past has been raked over in the Herald Sun recently, learned that the hardest possible way. He died.

Among the people he dudded, the fat drug dealer made the fatal mistake of cheating the dangerous man dubbed (for legal reasons) “The Runner”. He promised The Runner he would look after his old mum while the Runner faced the prospect of a long time inside for committing contract hits for him.

It’s a well-worn tale that Williams paid Runner’s mum some $1500 when the promise had been the price of a big car or a small flat. Result: in exchange for a $3.50 vanilla slice, The Runner joined the dots for the investigators, who put Williams inside … where he foolishly insisted on sharing a unit with the man who would cave his skull in.

Crooks aren’t the only ones who get their right whack. Some people will wait a lifetime to settle scores. Ballarat horse trainer Marita Murphy has gone public with her attack on two men who, as teenagers, sexually assaulted her when she was a small child.

Stone cold killer Matthew Johnson.

The older of the brothers — let’s call him Justin Time — is a prosperous businessman. This child rapist has ducked legal retribution but many people know exactly who he is and what he did in 1968. Social death, you’d think.

That brings us to another revenge tale involving a schoolmate of his. Let’s call this old boy Paul Casta. He has a face you could cut bread with, and a tongue to match.

When Casta became wealthy from his practice, he fancied the status of joining exclusive golf and tennis clubs. He’d come a long way from the teenage coward and bully he was in his teens.

Unfortunately for him, so had the little kid that he and a schoolmate had tormented unmercifully in the 1960s.

This pair of heroes used to ambush the kid doing his rounds, delivering flyers for a Brighton chemist on his bike.

The kid was half their size and years younger. Call him Stanley Steel.

The bullies would jam a broomstick through young Stan’s wheel spokes, scatter the flyers and bash him for no reason other than he was smaller and didn’t go to their school.

After weeks of this, the persecuted kid couldn’t keep doing the job.

Pressed, he admitted what had been happening. The chemist put a stop to it but young Stan never forgot or forgave his tormentors.

Fast forward 40 years, and the little kid is a tough and successful businessman and a committee member of a prestigious inner-suburban tennis club. When the now prominent Casta applies for membership, Stanley torpedoes it.

He tells shocked committee members that the wannabe member is “a bully and a coward and I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t punch him if I catch him alone in the club. He hurt me 10 times and I’m going to hurt him all at once.”

Point taken. Application rejected.

The cowardly Casta has never shown his ferrety face at the club again. Those who have noticed him lobbying for office at other clubs now know the reason why.

Covid lockdowns are playing havoc with prisoners’ toilet habits.

PRISONERS KICKING UP A STINK

There is no nice way to say this but the long Covid lockdowns have made prison life stink to high heaven.

Lockdowns are bad enough at any time but imagine being locked in a shared cell with one highly exposed toilet never more than 1.5m away.

Shared toilet equals shared stench.

As anyone who has watched the killer drama series Mr Inbetween would know, one of the big three rules of jailhouse etiquette is that the defecator must never use the cell toilet bowl ahead of a common-use dunny at the end of the block.

It is alleged that some inmates are so nervous of breaching the unwritten rule — and so “putting a hole in their manners” — that they have been going many painful days without relieving themselves during lockdown.

Our informer says: “The restrictions on inmate movements are impeding other movements to the point where (obscenity deleted) bowels are blowing up.”

DEATH OF A STRAIGHT SHOOTER

Many will have been saddened to learn of the recent death of straight-talking retired detective Paul Lunt. Even crooks grudgingly respected him.

He served Victoria Police for decades and did a stint at the old National Crime Authority, chasing with equal gusto everyone from street crooks to A-grade criminals like Dennis “Fatty” Smith.

It could be said he was one of those most responsible for police bringing the fight to middle-eastern organised crime that was rampant in the northern suburbs.

He declared war in 2008 with the kind of boss-blasting, bridge-burning email that would have brought a smile to the face of Jimmy McNulty, the uncompromising cop from television’s The Wire series.

Lunt, then stationed at Broadmeadows, was increasingly frustrated as low-level offenders graduated to be powerful criminals perpetrating serious violence and reaping big profits from drug crime.

Paul Lunt in 2007.

There was a bit of Jimmy McNulty about Lunt.

He tried the usual channels then, tired of being ignored, ripped into Victoria Police command’s “total incompetence”, inaction and lack of co-ordination.

“None of you have obviously learned lessons from … Purana,” he fumed in a message to pretty much everyone who mattered.

“The only difference here is that no one has died. And that is only good luck not good management. But you’re all more worried about your petty squabbles over staff ownership and whether you get criticised in the media.”

He would, no doubt, have lost some career bark from his pithy correspondence, particularly when it ended up in the papers, but he did go on to run a successful armed robbery task force and left on his own terms in 2014.

Most importantly, his email helped stimulate action up north. Since then, more resources have been devoted to middle-eastern crime in the area.

It is a tribute to his grit that the Echo task force, northwest metro crime team, combined with Federal and local investigators, have locked up plenty of big players.

DUD SONNET DON’T RHYME IN CRIME

Maybe growing up with a prissy surname like Sonnet made young Sean want to be a tough guy.

We can’t go into his history here but those with long memories will recall that Sonnet was present in court on that disgraceful day in 2000 to witness a group of prisoners throw excrement around. Contempt doesn’t get much smellier than that.

Sonnet later thought he was going to hit the big-time as Carl Williams’ bodyguard. Instead, he hit a wall.

While his lawyer brother Brett has forged an exemplary career on the right side of the law, Sean the once promising footballer has hit rock bottom.

Sean Sonnet once thought he’d made it in the criminal world.

This week he managed to get himself arrested for allegedly attempting to pull two piddling robberies in suburban Geelong with a knife. If it weren’t so pathetic it would be funny.

Sonnet’s alleged escapade reminds Deadline of one Stuart Holmes, a private school principal’s son who tried to rob the Bentleigh East post office wearing a wig and attempting to escape on a skateboard.

The skateboard bandit was caught 15 minutes later. Apparently he’d fortified his nerve with Dutch courage — a cocktail of “goon” cask wine, Diazepam and GHB and methamphetamines that might have warped his judgment a little.

Oddly enough, Holmes Jr. is a member of a small but growing club: Caulfield Grammar old boys who have made their names in odd ways.

Apart from the cadaverous rock and roll poet Nick Cave and enigmatic football millionaire Chris Judd, the school produced international drug runner David “The Villain” McMillan and international white collar criminal Christopher Skase.

Sonnet and Holmes should take comfort from the fact that even real tough guys get it wrong. The late hit man Jim “the Iceman Bazely” was deadly but was once grabbed by a one-legged butcher while trying to escape from an armed robbery.

It must have been humiliating for Bazely, but not many people laughed at him to his face.

PEPPER BALL PAIN, PANEL BEATER GAIN

Victoria Police copped a lot of stick from some quarters over its handling of last year’s protest riots in Melbourne.

A number of demonstrators complained of heavy-handed treatment from the law.

The word is that one of the aggrieved is a vehicle owner wanting compensation after his car was allegedly hit by a “pepper-ball” round intended for a human target.

This raises an interesting question for the force’s advisers and insurers: if a pepper ball is shot with such force that a panel beater is needed to repair the consequent damage to a car, what could it do to a human face?

A thought that lawyers on both sides must be pondering.