Despite silencing mates and crafting fake alibis Sunshine Crew gangsters died young and violently

In the underworld men typically die the way they lived, violently. It was no different for gunman Paul Kallipolitis and others in the infamous Sunshine Crew.

Paul Kallipolitis with Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin.

It’s 20 years this month since gunman Paul Kallipolitis died the way he lived — violently and with maximum treachery.

His killer was one of his closest allies, which made the hit a classic example of the crime cliche that both Kallipolitis and his assassin knew well: keep your enemies close and your friends closer.

That was on October 16, 2002. Exactly two years before, Kallipolitis was involved in killing his sometime friend Dino Dibra. And six years earlier he had pulled the trigger on another young drug dealer, Mark Anthony Walker.

Winners of world wars get to write history and the same goes with underworld wars. After Kallipolitis executed Walker, on what was then the edge of Melbourne’s sprawling western suburbs on a winter night in 1994, he got to twist the tale his own way.

The homicide squad, prosecutors and the dead man’s family and friends believed it was murder, but Kallipolitis and a skilled defence lawyer got the charge overturned, cutting a likely sentence of 18 years to five for manslaughter.

Gangland murder victim Paul Kallipolitis.

Despite the fact Walker died from two gunshots fired from behind, execution style, Kallipolitis’s lawyer persuaded an appeal court that it wasn’t as incriminating as it had looked to a jury.

One fact both sides agreed on was that Walker had gone with Kallipolitis to Boundary Riding Rd, Deer Park, the no man’s land of rocky, thistle-plagued paddocks that would, appropriately, soon become sites for new prisons on the western suburban fringe.

Trigger-happy thugs like Kallipolitis and his crew used these badlands, out of earshot of the nearest houses, to sort out criminal disputes the only way they knew how — with extreme violence.

The best a lucky loser could expect in one of these confrontations was a shattered kneecap or a pistol whipping. Mark Walker was the loser but he wasn’t lucky.

His body was found at the scene next morning, a pistol lying nearby. As lawyers say in Latin, “the thing speaks for itself”, but in this case the appeal court backed modern Greek against ancient Latin, accepting Kallipolitis’s creative version of events.

His account was that one of his friends, “Dean”, had tried to obtain drugs from Walker some time before the fatal confrontation in the early hours of July 24. According to Kallipolitis, Walker had turned angry and aggressive with “Dean” over the phone.

Kallipolitis admitted harsh words when he called Walker on his mate’s behalf, demanding to meet him face-to-face.

Kallipolitis said Walker had agreed to meet him at a local McDonald’s restaurant, which might have been true. But the rest of his story did not persuade detectives or a jury. He claimed that Walker, a sometime wrestler, pulled a gun and ordered him to drive to Riding Boundary Rd.

From that point the defence story sounded like something lifted from a B-Grade action film — which figures, because like too many young crooks, Kallipolitis modelled himself on Hollywood gangsters.

Andrew "Benji" Veniamin.

Hero of his own script, Kallipolotis claimed he’d grabbed the gun from Walker and shot him to save himself.

“I was scared, I couldn’t do nothing else. I thought he was going to shoot me — kill me,” Kallipolitis would later testify.

This version of events rang hollow to police who investigated Walker’s killing.

After the shooting, Kallipolitis and his mates drove to the banks of the Yarra River and carved their names in a tree as part of a lame attempt at setting up an alibi.

Kallipolitis would tell investigators he took “Dean” to the riverside for drinks to cheer him up, and they’d decided to carve their names in the bark as some sort of bonding exercise — which just happened, of course, to provide evidence they had been there.

He deserved to get 20 years for bad acting and a dud alibi. But he didn’t, serving less than five years for manslaughter before returning to the streets in the late 1990s. If anything, he came back more crazed than before.

They called him “PK”, and he was an arresting figure with his bleached blond hair, steroid-fuelled muscles and gym-rat physique. He was the oldest, and for a time the dominant, figure in what was called “the Sunshine Crew”, a grown-up teen gang that had emerged from working-class streets full of migrant families from around the world.

A young Dino Dibra was shot dead.

Starting as schoolboy thieves and vandals, the crew graduated to car theft, brawling and burglary, goading local police who could see they were going to end up in jail or dead if they didn’t pull up.

While hardworking kids around them went on to study or to careers, Kallipolitis and his reckless mates graduated into committing nearly everything in the Crimes Act: drug dealing, running cannabis crop houses, shootings, kidnappings and extortion.

His partners in crime were obscure then but would soon become notorious as the Sunshine Crew, which reflected the multicultural nature of modern Australia.

Kallipolitis, top dog in the gang, seemed close to fellow Greek Andrew “Benji” Veniamin. Then there was Dino Dibra, of Albanian parentage; Rocco Arico, a southern Italian; and Mark Mallia, who was a cross Maltese before being tortured to death and burnt in a drum. Then there was homegrown “skip” Michael Dewhirst.

All of them would die violently and young, except Arico, who is in jail at the time of writing and will be deported to Italy when released.

Kallipolitis grew more volatile and more paranoid because he both dealt drugs and used them. His brick home in Sunshine had metal shutters over windows and doors to block enemies and police. He never went anywhere unarmed and when he did leave home, it was on drug business or to stand over people, either direct extortion or debt collecting for others.

A man like that becomes a potential menace to almost everyone around them. None of his obvious enemies could reach him. It took a trusted insider to do that. His name was Benji Veniamin, the pint-sized hit man willing to kill anyone for a price.

Despite Chopper Read’s scathing assessment of Veniamin — “two inches shorter and he’d be a circus dwarf” — the little man was lethal, which had proved fatal for his sometime friend Dino Dibra, shot dead 22-years-ago this month.

The grave of Dino Dibra in Fawkner Cemetery. Picture: Jay Town

Dibra had already survived one shooting but there were no second chances when his treacherous “friend” emptied a pistol into him at home in Krambruk St, West Sunshine, on October 16, 2000.

Veniamin pulled the trigger that day but Kallipolitis was suspected of being part of the plot. And that fact, in the snake pit of underworld politics, might have signed his own death warrant.

Almost exactly two years later, the National Crime Authority intercepted a phone call in which Carlton identity “Fat Ange” Venditti allegedly invited Veniamin to fly to Queensland to enjoy the sun. Given that Veniamin was aligned with Kallipolitis, who happened to want to kill “Fat Ange”, investigators pricked up their ears. It smelled like the scenario for a classic double cross.

Whether Veniamin actually made the trip is unknown, and hardly matters, but there were plenty of colourful Melbourne characters in the sunshine state that week. According to investigators, 11 people attended the summit, including a Sydney millionaire, a heavy Melbourne drug dealer, a construction figure and the usual Carlton identities.

It is impossible to prove that Kallipolitis’s welfare was high on the agenda. But it is a matter of record that within days of the “sit down” in the sunshine up north, the Sunshine Crew had broken up down south: PK was dead and his one-time bestie “Benji” Veniamin was the only suspect.

Kallipolitis’s brother found the cold, stiff body on October 15, 2002 — half seated and half slumped on the floor against his bed. He had been killed three days earlier, shot five times in the head with a .38.

There were no signs of a break-in and the front door was unlocked. The classic inside job, committed by someone the victim welcomed into the house. Veniamin had called PK multiple times in the days before the hit, but never made another call to him afterwards because he knew he was dead.

An older Andrew Veniamin.

Why did Veniamin turn on one of his oldest “friends”? The answer might be that it wasn’t all about any money he was offered to do the hit, but more about his own paranoia, in that Kallipolitis could link him to shooting Dibra two years earlier.

Veniamin believed that Kallipolitis had prepared a letter which was left with a trusted solicitor in the case of his death. Veniamin believed that the letter would implicate him in Dibra’s murder.

The sawn-off hit man was only half right. There was a letter — but it didn’t mention him. Which proves the old saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Veniamin became a victim of his own reputation for treachery the day he unwisely entered a small space in a Carlton restaurant with Mick Gatto for a discussion in which he ran a clear second.

It was the little killer’s boyhood friend Dino Dibra who spoke for all the Sunshine Crew not long before Veniamin shot him.

Dibra told a Herald Sun reporter outside a city court, “Mate, I’ve just watched Reservoir Dogs too many times.”