Hitman Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin a liability to all in tortured final days
By the time Andrew “Benji” Veniamin confronted Mick Gatto at the back of his Carlton restaurant on this day 20 years ago, the hitman had become a liability to a growing list of enemies and anyone who had done “business” with him.
Police & Courts
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It’s a drowsy Tuesday afternoon and the Purana taskforce is deep in a meeting at the old St Kilda Rd crime squads complex. Investigators have plenty to discuss.
Behind the scenes, Purana is starting to make gains against the wave of gangland shootings. But a string of unsolved murders goes back almost two years to the shooting of Mark Moran outside his house.
After a busy morning chasing leads and reviewing surveillance “product”, the meeting lets investigators compare notes, trade rumours and ideas.
When the desk telephone starts ringing in an inspector’s office, the crew ignores it. The phone rings out then rings again and again until someone catches a junior team member’s eye.
The junior goes into the office to take the call. He looks as if it’s serious news. When he emerges and gestures for silence, older colleagues frown.
When he announces that Andrew Veniamin has been shot dead in a Carlton restaurant, they are downright sceptical. Veniamin, after all, has been monitored closely for some time.
Then the messenger tells the room the shooter is Mick Gatto.
“You’d better not be bullshitting,” someone says.
Turns out he wasn’t.
That’s how the news broke just after 2.30pm on March 23, 2004 — exactly 20 years ago this weekend. The violent death of Andrew “Benji” Veniamin in a tiny storeroom area at La Porcella restaurant was one of two shootings that stood out from most in the gangland war.
Like the brazen and daytime double killing of Jason Moran and his mate Paddy Barbaro after a children’s football game in Essendon the previous June, Veniamin’s death grabbed the public imagination.
For a start, “Benji” had become notorious as a hitman for hire, suspected of several underworld executions.
Secondly, he had been killed by a well-known and respected underworld figure, Mick Gatto, in highly controversial circumstances — unseen by any witnesses, despite the fact the pair had met publicly in the crowded restaurant only minutes before the shooting.
The High Noon element — which man drew first? — made Veniamin’s death irresistible. It was like something a script writer might make up, right down to the fact that chubby underworld figure Carl Williams and his wife Roberta rushed to the scene of their pet hitman’s death.
La Porcella, on the corner of Rathdowne and Faraday, was the same place where a key battle in the underworld war had erupted at a meeting in 2002, when rising drug baron Tony Mokbel was smashed by Perth outlaw biker Troy Mercanti, hired muscle for brutal Bulgarian gangster Nik Radev.
Veniamin had rushed Mokbel to a friendly doctor and possibly saved his life. The gesture sealed a friendship between Veniamin and Mokbel, the former pizza shop owner by this time known as head of the “tracksuit gang” that bet armloads of cash at Melbourne race meetings.
Before Mokbel’s beating, Veniamin had been on good terms with Gatto, former heavyweight boxer, heavyweight member of the Carlton crew and heavyweight “fixer” of industrial problems in the construction industry. But when no one stood up for Mokbel, Veniamin showed signs he’d switched camps, given that Mokbel was “in” with Carl Williams, sworn enemy of the Morans.
The former flyweight kick boxer and car thief from Sunshine had moved up from the gym to the standover business alongside emerging western suburbs gangsters like his supposed mates Paul Kallipolitis and Dino Dibra. Benji’s willingness to shoot anyone for money meant he posed a threat to people he knew as well as to those he didn’t.
That deadly reputation didn’t do the angry little man any favours. Like another erratic gun-for-hire a generation earlier, Christopher Dale Flannery, Veniamin had become a liability not just to a growing list of enemies but to anyone who had done “business” with him.
It was inevitable he would be arrested and offered deals in return for information implicating others in serious crimes. Anyone who had hired him risked being tied to murders.
Anyone as influential and rational as Mick Gatto, 20 years older and much wiser than Benji, knew he was a loose end and potential threat.
That fact had led to an earlier meeting at Crown Casino, where wall-to-wall security cameras guaranteed that no sane person would produce a gun there.
The casino meeting was back in December, just days after Gatto’s close friend Graham Kinniburgh had been shot outside his Kew home. What no one else knew then was that detectives had secretly cleared Veniamin as Kinniburgh’s assassin, with surveillance proving he had been on the other side of Melbourne the night “The Munster” died.
Veniamin knew he hadn’t killed Kinniburgh. But Gatto couldn’t be sure. And he was entitled to have doubts about Carl Williams, who’d been using Veniamin as his attack dog in his vendetta against the Moran family and so posed a threat to the Moran connections in the Carlton crew.
Even if Veniamin hadn’t shot Kinniburgh, Gatto knew the hit surely originated with Williams, who was bankrolling a killing spree that angered more sensible underworld players.
When police had the casino security footage played to lip-reading experts, Gatto was seen to tell Williams: “Anything with you, that’s your problem. But if anything comes my way then I’ll send somebody to you ... I’ll be careful with you, be careful with me. I believe you, you believe me, now we’re even. That’s a warning.”
The warning, of course, was also for Veniamin, who aped the motions of a Hollywood mobster that night by kissing Gatto’s cheek. To the shrewd Italian, a kiss from a sawn-off Greek hitman was not necessarily reassuring.
Neither was anything that happened during the three months before their deadly confrontation at La Porcella on that Tuesday.
In the absence of witnesses, human or electronic, and “smoking-gun” forensic evidence, the survivor of a fatal two-man clash “owns” the alleged crime scene. In the words of the great criminal lawyer Frank Galbally to clients, “give me a story that fits the facts,” a principle that Gatto no doubt understood.
His evidence fitted the facts and was a polished account. It went like this:
“It (La Porcella) had become my office, a place where I’d meet builders, businessmen, union officials, friends. Most days I was there. I felt safe, because I was confident that the police had the building under surveillance.
“Andrew … had dropped in … for a chat. We were standing in a back room, talking, when I told Andrew that he could no longer be trusted and I didn’t want to see him any more.
“His eyes started spinning in his head and his whole expression changed. He went from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde.
“I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was about to throw a punch. But he produced a gun. I don’t know where it came from — the back of his pants, I think.
“I froze for a moment, then my boxing reflexes saved me as I pushed the gun away. It went boom, straight past my head.
“I was convinced the bullet had hit me, but it hadn’t; it just left gunpowder marks on my jacket. The noise was deafening.
“I grabbed hold of his arm and turned the gun on him, squeezing his hand on the trigger, forcing him to shoot himself. And I kept squeezing…
“Then I fell on top of him. He was gurgling and gasping, and I pulled the gun out of his hand. And as he lay there, blood bubbling out of his mouth, I knew he was gone.”
There’s no doubt Veniamin died from .38 calibre revolver shots. The issue at trial was about who had brought the revolver. Or whether it had been “stashed” there earlier.
Apart from the small matter of later stating he’d been carrying a smaller (.25 calibre pistol) swiftly palmed off to a friend in the restaurant after the shooting, Gatto stuck staunchly to his self-defence story from that day until he gave evidence at his trial during 14 months on remand.
When Gatto’s mate, the late Brian “Mickey” Finn, eventually testified that he’d taken his .25 pistol and hidden it, prosecutor Geoff Horgan SC noted that (if Finn was not lying) it reinforced Gatto’s claim that Veniamin had produced the .38 revolver because it would be more likely Gatto was carrying one gun than two.
Interestingly, when Gatto was re-telling the story to his co-writer Tom Noble for their best-selling book, he stated: “Six people had also been shot in the few months before Graham was killed, and word was out that I was next. And so I was carrying a gun again, or making sure one was nearby.”
Cynics might suggest that on the day he arranged to meet Veniamin, Gatto surely was carrying a gun again — and might also have made sure “one was nearby”. That belt-and-braces principle might save prudent people from being caught with their pants down when killers come calling.
Gatto’s opinion to police that Veniamin was “very ambitious but had become increasingly erratic” was shared by others, including the then Assist. Comm. Simon Overland, who told reporters a fatalistic Veniamin had earlier advised police that “we shouldn’t even bother investigating his murder if it should occur.”
A well-connected Italian criminal who knew Gatto and Veniamin and had helped set up Victor Peirce for Veniamin to kill in 2002, had also noted Veniamin’s descent into depression and paranoia.
The Italian told police he noticed that the more killings Veniamin did, the more edgy he became.
He was especially agitated when he had trouble trying to set up the elusive and dangerous Peirce, because he knew Peirce was out to shoot him first.
The other thing that the Italian mentioned in a long police statement was that when Veniamin killed Peirce in a car in Port Melbourne, his semi-automatic pistol jammed and he had to break the car window and use a second gun he was carrying.
The point being that Veniamin was carrying two guns when he was “working”. But the chances of him hiding even a .38 revolver beneath a tee-shirt and tracksuit pants at La Porcella seemed remote to police and prosecutors.
Veniamin was known for planning hits with great care. If entering a narrow space with an armed enemy twice his size was planned, he must have had a death wish. Even if he’d shot the big man dead, he still had to escape through a restaurant of Gatto’s heavy mates after pausing to collect his phone and car keys from their table.
But history belongs to the winners. And the jury accepted Gatto acted in self-defence: that “some rat” tried to kill him “but finished up second best.”
Eight days later Lewis Moran was shot to square up.
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