How dirty scheme let pokie prizes come out clean in the wash
It seems some Melbourne punters will do anything to boost the returns on their bets, including helping crooks clean dirty money.
Police & Courts
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Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.
Winners’ hollers wash dirty dollars
If he was still with us today, canny drug boss George Williams would say he was way ahead of his time when it came to money-laundering.
There’s been a lot of talk about the cash-cleaning world after revelations crooks allegedly pushed $4.7m through the Greyhounds Entertainment venue in Springvale.
The syndicate busted by the Australian Federal Police at Greyhounds was allegedly paying jackpot winners for their prizes and throwing in a premium on top.
The jackpot’s new owner would then cash in the win for a cheque, thus sanitising their ill-gotten gains.
Deadline is hearing the activity was no secret at the venue and, in fact, was one of the attractions for punters wanting to get something extra at rates way better than bank interest.
It’s not outside the realms of possibility that the scam had some kind of connection with tidying up profits for those involved in the local heroin trade.
But, as with most criminal tricks, this modus operandi is nothing new.
More than 20 years ago, Williams would spend many a day plonked in a northern suburbs TAB, dressed in his work uniform of cardigan and slacks.
There he would go to work making punters happy and cleaning his drug profits.
Those who landed a big quaddie or trifecta could rely on old George to put an extra 10 per cent on top in exchange for the winning ticket.
Nice gravy and a win-win for all concerned.
Williams would then cash the ticket, consolidating what must have been the appearance of him being a very astute punter.
It’s said that the cleaned money bought him his house and plenty more.
Pumped to the max
He’s a man convicted and detained over one of our most brutal murders of recent times.
Now, Deadline is told the fellow may soon be back out and about in public.
The word is that he’s been hitting the gym hard to while away those long, boring hours out of circulation
One observer likened his physical transformation to Robert De Niro’s Max Cady from the second version of the suspense thriller Cape Fear.
Yikes!
Lenny made a pretty penny
Dirty rotten scoundrel Jeff Reading came to a sudden end in a car crash in 2009, which made for a cleaner city.
This was the Reading who (with two others) bashed harmless Carlton footy fan Dallas Broomhall to death outside the Brandon Hotel in Carlton after a home game.
The killers were “incited”, as police later put it, by a third man. He is probably still alive so we won’t identify him except to say he’s a reptile who would have been jailed with the other two except for a corrupt miscarriage of justice.
According to Broomhall’s brother-in-law and good mate, Barry McMurtry, Dallas wasn’t a boozer but sometimes liked a few beers after a game at Princes Park.
On the night of May 26, 1990, Carlton had beaten Fitzroy. Some recall that Carlton’s Jimmy Buckley was among footballers in the Brandon public bar that night with the colourful Blues powerbroker “Dicky” Merton but, like other drinkers and bar staff, they saw nothing.
Not that they could be blamed for that, because Reading and Hinds attacked Broomhall outside in the dark while the third man blocked the door to stop anyone witnessing the assault or helping the victim.
It wasn’t until a passer-by saw Broomhall’s body slumped on the pavement that someone called an ambulance. Reading and his mates should have been charged with manslaughter, if not murder. But the story goes that arch criminal Lewis Moran brokered a $50,000 bribe for a well-known detective to derail the wheels of justice.
But Jeff Reading and his other brother Joey didn’t get all the breaks, according to former gangland lawyer Andrew Fraser, who tells the story of the little-known third Reading brother, Lenny.
Fraser recalls that the tough Reading brothers treated their sibling Lenny as “an imbecile”. So when Lenny won Tattslotto in his own name, with a ticket he paid for, he took great pleasure in pocketing the big windfall and telling Jeff and Joey to get well and truly nicked.
Cop this plate!
Want to attract police attention?
How about having a personalised number plate saying ESKOBR, like the fellow seen out on the road last week by a Deadline spy.
It may, of course, not be a reference to the infamous Colombian drug tsar but did bring to mind some other cheeky number plates guaranteed to irritate police.
“EASY 10” and “BAIL” are a couple of examples, along with “KRUPT” and “GOT OFF”.
A few years ago, Queenslander Zak Trimble shared pics standing in front of a car bearing the plates JA1L ME but it proved yet more proof of the need to be careful what you wish for.
Police did just that a while later, locking Trimble up for drug offences and driving a stolen car.
Terminal error by Les
Youth worker Les Twentyman should have been around long enough not to backchat a man snapping on rubber gloves for a search.
But he just couldn’t help himself after his hernia support recently caused a scanner to activate at Dubai Airport, leading to a security man deciding to have a closer look while his wife Cherie looked on
“As he started feeling me, I was joking (and) said to her I think this guy loves doing this,” Twentyman wrote on social media.
It ended before the probing could go any further when it was realised that Twentyman was actually in the wrong part of the terminal.
That’s not gangsta!
Good to see another bunch of street thugs with gangster fantasies get rounded up last week.
The punks spent a few days driving the southeastern suburbs in a stolen Audi, which seems often to be the vehicle of choice for such types.
At one stage, four of them monstered a 14-year-old boy on Windsor St, Hallam, and stole his mobile phone.
The group was also connected to commercial burglaries and home break-ins in Baxter, Clayton, Cranbourne North in which more than $5000 in cash and cigarettes valued at over $2000 were stolen.
Southern metro region crime detectives have charged three boys aged between 15 and 17 over the spree.
Accused kidnappers who allegedly tortured man with a hammer to stand trial
Three people who allegedly kidnapped a Melbourne man off the street and tortured him with a hammer have been ordered to stand trial in the County Court.
‘Grateful nobody died’: Owner’s relief after house ruined in landslide
The owner of a house that crashed down the cliffs at McCrae in a landslide says he’s “very grateful” that no one was “injured or killed” as he revealed his family’s near-miss in another landslip a week earlier.