Deadline: YouTube star Spanian visits Melbourne to tour most notorious suburbs
YouTube star Spanian made his name walking some of the world’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, and now he’s visited Melbourne to see what life’s like in our city’s most notorious suburbs.
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Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.
Spanian rates Dandenong our toughest hood
Spanian is an Australian rapper and YouTube phenomenon with 528,000 subscribers.
The Sydneysider’s website says he spent 12 years in prisons and boys’ homes before going straight and building his enormous following with a range of videos examining the tougher side of life.
Spanian’s latest project is a series of videos called “Into the Hood” in which he “travels the world walking through some of its most dangerous and notorious neighbourhoods to see how life really is for people in these places.”
Among those already profiled are Blokovi in Serbia and Sweden’s Rosengard, said to be Europe’s gun crime capital.
The unkind might suggest it was a natural progression when Spanian recently visited Melbourne and headed straight to Dandenong as part of the series.
As he moves through Melbourne’s CBD trying to navigate the Myki system, Spanian asserts that Dandy has more citizens in the prison system than any other part of our city.
Furthermore, it is a meeting point for a “lot of dramas, a lot of fights.”
Deadline had barely heard of Spanian but it was clear once he got off the Cranbourne line train that plenty in Dandenong are lovers of his work.
He was followed throughout the episode by a band of merry men and women fortunate to be able to spare the time for the experience.
A man in a yellow cap led a guided tour of some of the hardest parts of the suburb.
A little boy who looked still of primary school age tells Spanian about the time he was stabbed with a syringe by a “junkie”
There is a visit to some kind of house where prison inmates stay after being released.
At one stage, a woman pulls over and asks Spanian to pose with a bottle of Fijian liquor.
All the while, locals drive past the group shouting at Spanian and hanging from vehicles like it was Taylor Swift in the hood.
After pronouncing Dandenong as “mad”, Spanian and his growing entourage move to Doveton which, he’s told, supplied the highest rate of male imprisonment for some years.
Everyone cruises past a place where locals do their court-imposed community service work before a visit to the shops where Spanian poses for more selfies.
At some stage they pass a “super brothel”.
There is a squeal of rubber as a car salutes the group at high speed before BMWs give separate burnout displays in some kind of local tyre-smoking ceremony.
A man approaches Spanian and tells him he’s just got out of medium-security Ravenhall Correctional, choosing to do his full term to avoid parole conditions.
“I’d rather do the time,” he says.
Soon after, someone notes a spot where his mate’s sister was killed by a local butcher.
They visit a local boxing gym before the whole thing wraps up with Spanian getting a lift in yellow cap man’s Lamborghini.
The video doesn’t mock the locals in any way and the viewer comments beneath the video indicate plenty of others want him to tour their local.
“Can’t wait for the Frankston Vlog” and “definitely need to look into going to Moe and Morwell,” were two of them.
“Sunshine and Melton are also crazy,” wrote another poster.
“Would be mad to see some of Melbourne’s west in an episode. Sunshine/Maidstone … outer west Tarneit and Melton,” another said.
But there was one person who wanted to offer some perspective on the Dandenong experience.
“Living in Manila, this is our dream to live in a neighbourhood like this. Can’t believe these people sit around doing crime,” that poster wrote.
Spanian says he is set to look into some other Melbourne badass suburbs, among them “Fitzroy”.
Some would say the greatest danger posed by Fitzroy might be burning your lips on a coffee overheated by a distracted hipster barista.
Perhaps he meant Footscray.
No comment
There’s the strong, silent type — then there’s David Miechel.
Let’s just say the disgraced former drug squad detective is regarded as a man who’s ultra-economical with words.
That explains his silence when corruption investigators wanted to know about the activities of some of his colleagues in the aftermath of an infamous 2003 drug house burglary in Oakleigh.
Deadline was scouting around some old documents from the Royal Commission in the Management of Police Informers recently when we came across a reference to Miechel being discreetly approached to see if he’d tell investigators a little about the murder of police informer Terry Hodson and his wife Christine in 2004.
Miechel was, of course, a prisoner by that time, but he had no intention of breaking the code of silence. An investigator noted the rogue cop’s succinct retort when a Corrections Victoria official quietly asked if he’d care to help Petra task force investigators.
“Reply from Miechel — inappropriate for inclusion in this document,” the detective wrote of the singularly unsuccessful approach.
Miechel and Hodson had been, of course, busted at the scene of a massive theft at the Oakleigh house where a stockpile of drugs and cash was stashed.
Apart from being savaged by an honest police dog on the night, the one-time country boy from Cobram way faced a very long jail sentence for which his stoic silence guaranteed no discounts when a little talking might have got him a handy sentence reduction.
Still, he ended up better off than the Hodsons, both shot dead at their home in Harp Rd, Kew, in 2004.
The double killings are unsolved and odds on to remain that way. There is little doubt which cold-blooded killer pulled the trigger and which drug-dealing reptile brokered the deal.
But the answer to who ordered the hit appears to be in the cone of criminal and corrupt cop silence.
Stares and whispers in ’Rat city
Ballarat might have 117,000 people but it’s a country town underneath, complete with a round-the-clock rumour mill.
In the town of stares and whispers, everyone has a theory on the disappearance of wife and mother Samantha Murphy, first reported missing by her husband on Sunday, February 4.
Police were told she had gone jogging early that morning — and had failed to return for a family brunch. The jogging story suggests she would have left home early to run on quiet tracks through nearby bushland in the Ballarat East-Delacombe area.
Early in the week, police released what they believed was fleeting security camera footage of the missing woman running past a local driveway entrance.
But it turned out, in fact, that the passing jogger was another person who eventually notified police of the mistaken identity. Which means that, after nine days and counting, despite repeated police appeals for dashcam or security camera footage of Samantha toiling along her presumed running routes, none has turned up.
This “black hole” of potential evidence is puzzling for investigators, who now have to look at alternative explanations to a simple lost jogger — such as Samantha having left the vicinity in a vehicle of some sort, either voluntarily or against her will in sinister circumstances.
In the absence of facts, plenty of people are rushing to judgement — and they can’t be all right. Perhaps none of them are.
Both Samantha and Mick Murphy are well-known in the area, where Mick has run a panel beating business for several years. Samantha has a fine reputation.
Everyone who knows her is adamant that they cannot imagine she would leave her family voluntarily.
A family’s pain
Last Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of the stabbing murder of Boronia mother Nanette Ellis.
Ms Ellis died in the most brutal fashion, ambushed soon after arriving home and found by her teenage son Greg on their back porch.
She had in the weeks prior been subjected to a sustained campaign of terror which forced her to put a gun and baseball bat by the front door in case of trouble.
The homicide squad last week made a fresh appeal for help to solve the killing of the hardworking single mother.
The lingering impact of this crime four decades on was made clear in an eloquent statement issued by her family.
“To this day we remain tormented at the thought of what she endured,” they wrote.
“The sequence of events leading up to the day she died, and the brutality of her last moments. Had she died from illness, she would have been surrounded by the care and affection of others.
“If she had died of an accident, someone would have been there to help and support. But there is no comfort to be had, there is no consoling thought in the way she died, attacked brutally in the sanctity of her own home, which should have been the safest of havens.”
Anyone with information can call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or visit the website crimestoppersvic.com.au.
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