Harebrained hit team who killed in front of kids

A team of Melbourne hit men were so reckless they assassinated a target in front of his five-year-old son, even after finding a police bug in their car.

The messy crime scene where Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro were gunned down.

Gangland murder plots involved some harebrained schemes but one particular hit team didn’t care how they got the job done.

The pair cannot be named, but for a short time in 2003 “The Runner” and his driver, who we call “Shifty’’, joined forces as Carl Williams’ death squad.

Both, it’s believed, had killed for Williams before.

Shifty was softly spoken, but all evil.

He was raised by Nazi-sympathising parents who abused him as a child only to become a rapist and drug dealer in adulthood.

He was suspected of killing Mark Moran in 2000 on behalf of Williams.

The other police theory was Shifty drove Williams to Moran’s luxury Aberfeldie property so he could do the job himself.

In 2003, when the gangland fury began to peak, the Runner and Shifty were two of the war’s key protagonists.

The sawn-off shotgun used to kill Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro, was dropped alongside the van they died in.

Their road to infamy began in June when they teamed up to blow away Jason Moran at an Auskick Clinic in Essendon.

Five kids had just piled into Moran’s mini-van as the Runner, wearing a balaclava, dashed from where Shifty sat in a getaway car.

Moran had a split second to eyeball the Runner and realise he was about to die.

Sadly for him, it wasn’t enough time for him to reach for the gun he had stuffed down his pants.

After blasting Moran with a shotgun, the Runner reached for a handgun to make sure of it.

He also used it to take out Moran’s bodyguard in the passenger seat, Pasquale “Little Pat’’ Barbaro.

The shocking executions in front of children burst Melbourne’s gangland war into the public’s consciousness.

It had been triggered in 1999 when the Moran brothers shot Williams in the guts in a tiny suburban park.

But while Williams was satisfying his lust for revenge, he also unwittingly galvanised the newly established anti-gangland Purana taskforce to clamp down on his murderous path.

It didn’t stop Williams using the hit team to kill another target just four months later.

Jason Moran’s children witnessed their father’s execution.

He ordered the Runner and Shifty to kill hotdog vendor and drug dealer Michael Marshall.

Such was their recklessness, even when Shifty found a police bug in a car they were using, the mission wasn’t aborted.

Police, who were unaware of what was being planned, were listening as Shifty drove the Runner through the tree-lined streets of South Yarra.

They stopped in Joy St when the Runner flung the car door open.

Moments later he gunned down a defenceless Marshall.

The Runner, as he had done with Moran months earlier at a football clinic, wasn’t perturbed Marshall’s five-year-old son was with him.

“Someone shot my daddy, someone shot my daddy,’’ a witness would hear the boy say.

The callous hit men then drove to the Elsternwick Hotel and made a call to Williams.

Carl Williams: “Hello”

Hitman: “How are ya?”

Hitman: “Hey, I think that horse got scratched, the one you and George tipped me for.

Carl Williams: Oh did it?”

Hitman: “Yeah, I think it got scratched. Never mind. I think it might race next week anyway.’’

Jason Moran. Picture: Graham Crouch

Carl Williams

Within minutes Shifty and the Runner were arrested by the force’s Special Operations Group.

These were the gangland war’s first major arrests.

They would be significant in cracking the underworld’s code of silence.

First Shifty, and then the Runner, would become their most important assets in toppling Williams and others.

It didn’t hurt investigators probing Williams that he had short-changed the Runner.

After Williams went down on the Marshall murder charge, he too joined the conga-line of gangland players to strike a deal.

He pleaded guilty to murdering Mark Mallia, Jason Moran and Lewis Moran and also fessed up to a failed plot to execute Mario Condello.

Judge Betty King provoked an outburst from Williams when she sentenced him to life in prison with a minimum term of 35-years.

Williams believed it was harsh. He was almost alone in this belief.

He lasted less than six years as a Barwon Prison inmate when his own communications with police became common knowledge.

It cost him his life.

It was a different story for the Runner and Shifty, who carried out his dirty work.

They both were convicted for murder, but like Williams they got away with more than they confessed to.

Shifty – convicted of a single murder – may now walk among us. The Runner would be by now warming up for another stint on the outside.

Their identities are suppressed for life.

Not bad for a couple of ruthless hit men.