Gangland murder of Willie Thompson sparks ‘enormous fallout’
Two decades on and the execution murder of bouncer and drug dealer Willie Thompson remains unsolved, with one suspect – an apparent doppelganger for a reality star – still evading police.
Police & Courts
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THE worst crime Simon “Hotdogs” Deering has committed is to streak on camera on the set of a reality television show.
That is, of course, apart from the unfortunate incident that led to him being charged with public nuisance committed outside a Cairns nightclub. A small matter of answering a call of nature.
So what does Deering, an almost-forgotten Big Brother contestant, have to do with the execution murder of Willie Thompson, a martial artist, bouncer and drug dealer, exactly 20 years ago this week?
Nothing at all, except he happens to resemble someone the police want to talk to. Deering’s physical appearance in that era (his brief flirtation with reality TV fame came and went in 2005) might be the best clue police have to identifying who sprayed Thompson with gunfire as he got into his car outside a martial arts gym in East Malvern that night.
When police artists, 16 years later, produced a likeness of a suspected third member of the hit team, someone with a long memory was reminded of “Hotdogs from Big Brother” — which was simply shorthand for a dark-haired, tanned young man.
Willie Thompson, by contrast, was fair-skinned, with short receding hair and the bulky muscles of a pro bouncer rather than a pro athlete. Thompson was as well-known among crooks as he was unknown to the public, the sign of a quiet achiever on the dark side.
He was tough, judging from the calibre of the hard crew that carried the casket at his funeral — a scene that created one of the most potent images of the underworld war.
By then it was clear the increasingly erratic and paranoid Carl Williams was courting danger. The more he feared his enemies the more he ordered pre-emptive strikes.
It was inevitable that during Carl Williams’ homicidal frenzy in 2003, he was going to order a killing that would trigger what he wanted to avoid — his own death. If, as suspected, he organised the killing of Willie Thompson, he triggered a domino effect that would eventually destroy him.
The one-time Broadmeadows burglar should have known he was playing with fire.
For a start, Thompson was a respected member of a tight group of violent, seasoned crooks with a commando ethos: martial artists turned armed robbers. Secondly, he was an old friend of Melbourne’s Mr Big of party drugs, Tony Mokbel.
It happened on July 21, 2003, a Monday night. Thompson worked out three nights a week at Extreme martial arts gym at 660 Warrigal Rd, Chadstone, on the Waverley Rd intersection.
He lived in a smart townhouse at 11 Orcades Mews, Port Melbourne, with a divorced male friend, and was engaged to long-term fiancee Mary Dimitriou. But he had links with the East Malvern area, as did the hardworking and respectable Mary. Some of Thompson’s oldest allies, hard men well-known to police, came from that patch.
At 39, Thompson was confident and a creature of habit. In another life, those qualities might have brought corporate success. But in his business, which largely involved trafficking illicit drugs, they could be fatal.
He would get to the gym around 6pm, usually parking his soft-top Honda roadster around the corner in Waverley Rd, where it could easily be spied.
On this night, Thompson finished his workout around 8.30pm but waited around to talk. He didn’t leave the gym until around 9.15 to walk to his car.
He dropped his gear in the boot, then stepped into the silver roadster. As he did, a maroon Ford sedan cut across Waverley Rd and stopped at a sharp angle next to the Honda. A white van had parked behind the sports car as if to block it.
Two gunmen jumped out of the stolen Ford. The one with a shotgun ran to the driver’s door. The other, with a .45 calibre handgun, went to the passenger side. They opened fire and Thompson died instantly with seven wounds to the head and torso.
The shooters drove off in the Ford, which was found torched in Port Melbourne within the hour. The van vanished.
Homicide and Purana detectives threw themselves at the investigation. But, according to the coroner’s finding 14 years later, they would uncover little more than they did in the first few weeks.
One thing they did deduce was that a third man was involved, presumably whoever was driving the white van. But whether this third man was the dark-haired suspect (the one who looked like “Hotdogs” Deering) or whether he was one of the two gunmen, detectives have never made clear.
Now, with the 20th anniversary of the murder, little has changed. There’s still speculation about who killed Thompson but no clear indication of why. The low-key gangster who’d risen without trace is almost as much of a mystery as he was in life.
Genealogy sleuth Sue McBeth, expert in forensic probing of archives, has established that William Aubrey Thompson was born in Melbourne to a single woman on December 16, 1963.
If his mother, Patricia, knew who the baby’s biological father was, she didn’t record it on the birth certificate.
Willie Thompson stayed anonymous. There is little on record about him other than he was the registered owner of A2Z Amusements Pty Ltd and the only shareholder of Cumberland Pty Ltd. He’d worked as a bouncer but wasn’t licensed as a crowd controller.
His visible sources of income were slight, yet he lived comfortably without overt displays of wealth. His sports car was relatively modest. The modern townhouse he shared in Orcades Mews in Port Melbourne was similar to the car — smart but not ostentatious.
It’s fair to assume that if Thompson had extensive assets they were liquid and well-hidden. On the books, he had local assets of $150,000 and liabilities of $66,348. But it turned out he also had at least $245,000 in the Alpha Bank in Greece.
The fact Thompson had chosen to bank money in Greece might be partly because his fiancee, Mary Dimitriou, was of Greek parentage. Having the Greek bank account hints he was cagey enough to want serious cash planted overseas in case he had to flee Australia for a long time. As did, in fact, his friend Tony Mokbel, infamously caught in Athens long after escaping Australia stowed on a yacht.
On the other hand, of course, Thompson planned to marry his Melbourne sweetheart in Greece in 2004. The money might well have been earmarked for a big, fat Greek wedding.
But if the would-be bridegroom was actually planning a big, fat Greek escape route, it underlined that he was in the same bloodstained game of greed as Mokbel and Williams and the rest. Either way, his plans didn’t work any better than theirs.
Exactly who, why and how someone pulled strings to get Thompson shot is known to very few people. The late Carl Williams is widely thought to have played a big hand in it, but stories vary as to how this came about.
Two police informers each independently told Purana taskforce investigators that Thompson had fallen out with erratic gangland figure Nik Radev and his mate Mark Mallia.
One witness made a statement that there’d been a dispute over drugs sold by Thompson to Mallia and that Radev demanded that $450,000 be repaid. According to this version of events, Tony Mokbel’s brother Milad was called in to mediate. If so, mediation apparently failed.
The other informer’s version was that Mallia and Radev had ripped off Thompson and his housemate and “there were a lot of arguments.”
Radev was murdered three months before Thompson was. Andrew “Benji” Veniamin shot Radev in a set-up involving Carl Williams and his father George.
Although Radev was dead (the second informer said), his angry comrades hit back by killing Thompson.
None of which means that Carl Williams wasn’t involved, playing a treacherous double game that would eventually lead to his own death.
Whether accurate or not, the perception that Mark Mallia was involved in Thompson’s murder could be what got Mallia killed in the worst way. Just 28 days after Thompson’s execution, Mallia was found dead after being tortured with a soldering iron in a garage in the northern suburbs.
It’s interesting, though proof of nothing, that Mallia’s torture was unique in the gangland war. Other victims were blown away without warning, usually while getting in or out of cars as Thompson was.
It is unclear what Mallia’s interrogators wanted to know. His burnt body was later found in a wheelie bin at a Sunshine sports reserve.
In the end, there was enormous fallout from Thompson’s murder. Purana was later told of a meeting at a suburban Red Rooster restaurant attended by an angry Tony Mokbel, a deadpan Carl Williams and other criminals.
An address was supplied for Michael Marshall, the drug dealer and hot-dog salesman that Mokbel believed responsible for Thompson’s death. Mokbel put $300,000 on Marshall’s life.
Police would later come to believe that Williams acted the part of a concerned ally, and got Marshall killed for supposedly committing a crime Williams had in fact been party to.
It was a case of Williams taking enough rope to hang himself. After the Marshall hit, the shooter and the getaway driver were quickly arrested, as they were already under surveillance following the murders of Jason Moran and “Little Pat” Barbaro at Essendon a few months before.
Williams the would-be warlord was brought down by his own stupidity and arrogance. He hadn’t paid “his” shooters or looked after their families as promised. And so, of course, they “rolled” on him, the only way they could get revenge.
Inevitably, Williams landed in the jail cell where he was murdered in 2010, seven years after Willie Thompson’s execution.
Mary Demitriou moved back from Port Melbourne to respectable East Malvern with her parents. And “Hotdogs” Deering? He is married with two children and sells real estate in Perth.
Given the Willie Thompson reward still stands, someone else who once looked like Deering has a million reasons to be nervous.
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