Deadline: Two more dunces join Melbourne’s hit-man hall of shame
Melbourne is a world leader in bungling hitmen, and a brainless pair of bikies have just joined the long list of the criminally incompetent.
Police & Courts
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Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.
Big guns, small brains
Melbourne seems to be a world leader in the production of bungling gangland killers.
The city’s ignominious list of murderous criminal losers grew longer last week with the convictions of Mongol bikies Aaron Ong and Josh Rider.
The brainless pair of killers are up there with Comanchero Hasan Topal, who gunned down the wrong victims twice in 2017.
Stephen Mordy committed a similar blunder when he shot Niddrie mum Jane Thurgood-Dove instead of his likely intended target 20 years earlier. Not that shooting his intended target, the unsuspecting wife of a small time crook, would have been more morally acceptable.
In 1984, Roy Pollitt shot dead innocent tradie Lindsay Simpson at Lower Plenty. In 2015 Rachad Adra of Thomastown suffered fatal wounds from bullets meant for someone else.
Rider and Ong joined that grim list by murdering innocent fruiterer Paul Virgona, apparently instead of a Finks outlaw gang member that key police presume was their real quarry.
It was a crime of breathtaking idiocy, committed within weeks of Rider promising a court he was a changed man to avoid a jail term over a cowardly bashing.
The unanswered question is whether the Virgona murder was entirely the work of the hit team.
The smart money says that others were probably involved in ordering and funding the shooting on EastLink in November, 2019, given Rider and Ong seem barely able to tie their own shoelaces.
The fact is that we may never know. Even worse — if there were other players — is that they will probably never do prison time for bringing a Mexican drug cartel-style atrocity to Melbourne.
If Ong and Rider were acting on orders, the only silver lining is that they were probably never paid and are now looking at a long stretch in prison.
The case appears to be a reminder of the dangers of easy assumptions.
Because Virgona was a fruiterer of Italian extraction, some jumped to the conclusion that his death must be something to do with his job.
The fact that several other Italian-Australians involved in the notorious wholesale vegetable and fruit market have been murdered, or have committed murders, does tend to do colour perceptions.
Italian organised crime murders in Australia extend back to the 1920s, with a wave of killings, bashings and standover tactics making big news during the Melbourne “market murders” in the 1960s. The market’s sinister reputation for gunplay and violence extended until this century, although not always publicly.
In 1990, Calabrian Italian mafia figures were angered because Frank Costa’s wholesale fruit business was about to take a hefty slice of the Coles business — and end the long-running racket of retailers paying “tax” of 50 cents a case.
The first warning was when a building rented by the Costa Group was torched on a Sunday night. Soon after, a Coles distribution manager arriving early for work was bashed by two thugs.
The third warning was when Coles’ new state manager John Vasilopoulos, employed to end the mafia standover racket, was shot when he answered his door in Ivanhoe on the night of December 19, 1990.
The hardworking, community-minded Vasilopoulos had shotgun pellets removed from his knees, thighs, stomach, chest and arms, but lived — which was more than many other mafia victims did.
His crime was to be a brave man willing to stand against entrenched corruption.
The point, if there is one, is that when it comes to the fruit and vegetable market, the Italian mafia has had serious form for decades for standing over others — mostly fellow Italians tied by the “omerta” code of silence.
When investigators decided that murder victim Paul Virgona was nothing but a hardworking, community-minded father and husband whose only crime was leaving for work at 2am, it came as a slight surprise to some watchers.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have. He was, police believe, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Justice too little, too late for alicia
Bad things happen at Christmas time. Jokes about warring families mask the bleak reality of domestic violence that too often erupts in the days between Christmas Eve and the new year.
Take the case of Alicia Little. The system moved too slowly to save Alicia, whose tolerance of violent partners led to a relationship with the serial wife-basher who killed her three days after Christmas 2017, just two weeks after he had asked her worried parents if he could marry her.
Charles McKenzie Ross Evans drove his ute into Alicia on a property near Kyneton, crushing her against a concrete tank, the final act of a toxic relationship that was a car crash waiting to happen.
Among those who feared for Alicia were her parents and her adult children, her siblings, and Evans’s former wife and two children, who knew exactly what he was capable of: extreme and sustained violence and manipulation, usually behind closed doors.
After charges were drastically lowered from murder to dangerous driving causing death, Evans was sentenced to four years, serving only 30 months before being released on parole in 2020.
Early in his sentence, Evans asked to be moved from mainstream prison and sent to the “dogs’ jail” at Ararat, where sex offenders (and a few former police) are segregated from other prisoners for their own protection.
Some people in prison knew Evans and did not wish him well.
After being released, Evans went to Queensland to live with relatives. Alicia’s mother, Lee Little, meanwhile, has had to live with the torment of knowing her daughter’s death was preventable but still not prevented.
Earlier this month, state coroner John Cain released a detailed finding which put Alicia Little’s death in the correct light.
Judge Cain found that although the deceased was a robust woman who would defend herself, she was not the “primary aggressor” that Evans cunningly portrayed to police after an ugly incident in 2015 which left Alicia in hospital.
Because she had bitten Evans when he assaulted her, he was able to “sell” the story that he had been forced to manhandle her because she’d attacked him. In the absence of independent witnesses, and probably because of the woman’s distracted and distressed state, police innocently accepted Evans’s version of events.
In the end, that mistake might have led indirectly to Alicia’s death two years later. Because she had been successfully painted as the aggressor in a volatile relationship, it meant her subsequent calls for help tended not to be taken as seriously or as urgently as they might have been.
The bleak truth about Evans wasn’t hard to establish.
The coroner noted “Evans’ ex-wife and two of his children have stated that he perpetrated extensive family violence against his ex-wife, including physical and verbal abuse, controlling behaviour and stalking. (He) also had a criminal history, having previously been convicted of common assault.”
The truth about Charles Evans came too late to save Alicia Little. But her story underlines the risk of believing the best talker at a scene of violence without neutral witnesses.
Lee Little spoke publicly about her daughter’s life and death at a family violence rally in Melbourne at the weekend.
Lee earlier told Deadline she will never forget something Evans’s ex-wife told her: that he used to watch true crime television shows obsessively, studying ways to beat the system.
Queen Street gunshots still echo
It is 35 years this month since the Queen St massacre, which cost eight innocent people their lives two weeks before Christmas in 1987.
Frank Vitkovic, a 22-year-old dropout from Melbourne University law school, walked into the 18-storey office block at 191 Queen St with a sawn-off military carbine and 225 rounds of ammunition in ten loaded magazines.
After trying (unsuccessfully) to shoot a former schoolmate, Con Margelis, Vitkovic executed a series of random victims, most of them young.
In the rush of reporting Melbourne’s second mass shooting just five months after the Hoddle St massacre, police relayed some names and details with slight errors, which have remained on the record and have sometimes been repeated.
Stephen Dowling, brother of one of the victims, has kindly pointed out that his late sister (shot on the 11th floor) was Catherine Dowling, not Caroline. And that her middle name was Mary, not the name used in the memorial window in the Elizabeth St post office.
He writes, with understandable frustration, “You would have thought that more effort would have gone into a memorial window that is still there today and probably will be there for many more years.
“Also her workmate (whose desk was a metre or two away from hers) was Marianne Van Ewyk (not Ewk). I know this name well because they are buried alongside each other in Templestowe cemetery.”
If looks could kill
There was an unfortunate outbreak of photo-bombing by a gangland figure in Melbourne recently.
This identity, normally not averse to having his picture taken, was in the background as someone took a phone camera shot of a group of friends enjoying a meal.
The result was a nice picture apart from the inadvertent inclusion of the crime identity.
Fair to say that if looks could kill, the mates would have soon be gathering at the funeral of the happy snapper.
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