Undercover Cop podcast: Different breed of crook lurking along Lygon St

Shot in the leg at point-blank range, the old Italian man had developed a sudden case of amnesia — he hadn’t seen or heard anything. Welcome to Alphonse Gangitano’s Carlton.

Lachlan McCulloch moved to Carlton, where he got to test his skills against a different breed of crook.

This is part four in the Undercover Cop series. Catch up on the series and listen to the podcast here.

Working plainclothes is one thing, making it to a fully fledged detective is better. Lachlan McCulloch, the footloose kid who had barely scraped into the force, was the first of his squad to make detective.

He did it in less than four years, an achievement that surprised everyone except himself.

Working in the “St Kilda police force” had taught him everything he needed to know about how to “think like a crook.”

Now it was time to test his skills against a different breed of crook in a different part of town.

Carlton appealed to him, mainly because it wasn’t St Kilda with 24/7 drug trafficking and its offshoots, prostitution and burglary.

Carlton was home base for Italian organised crime figures operating in the shadows behind restaurants, bars, pizza joints and other businesses in Lygon St.

True, the Italian crooks stuck together but there’s nothing like money to broaden the mind, and so the sons of old-time mafiosi palled up with old-time Aussie crime families, who regarded Carlton’s home ground at Princes Park as their personal social club. The links between people like the notorious Morans and heavy Carlton figures ran wide and deep.

Just how wide and how deep, the newly minted detective McCulloch did not know until well after he arrived.

It took McCulloch six months to realise he didn’t quite know what was going on in Carlton. But he caught a whiff of established friendships between police and certain local interests, and the longer he was there, the stronger the smell got.

In St Kilda, most crime was committed by junkies. In Carlton, the tough guys carried guns. The one that caused most of the trouble in those days was Alphonse Gangitano, so well-known as a standover man that everyone knew him by his first name.

One day McCulloch was called to St Vincent’s Hospital. An older Italian man had been shot in the upper leg at point-blank range with a heavy calibre pistol. His skin had black powder burns around the bullet hole.

The incident seemed to have given the wounded man amnesia. He said he’d been in a cafe and noticed his leg was “leaking” but had no idea how or why. He had seen or heard nothing.

McCulloch nodded and walked away. But as he passed the wounded man’s upset relatives he stopped to perform a little charade.

He turned around and called loudly to the bleeding man: “Thanks again, sir. We’ll protect you. We’re going to go and arrest Alphonse. He could have killed you. You won’t have to give evidence for a couple of months”.

It was like throwing a bomb. Distraught relatives ran to the wounded man, shouting in Italian. They were frantic about what the crazy Aussie detective was saying. No one wanted uncle Giuseppe to stand up in court to accuse mafia standover men.

It was, of course, another example of McCulloch’s quirky humour. It didn’t stop there. On the way back to the station, he said later, he and his partner went to the cafe where the mystery shooting had happened and took the chair with the bullet hole in it.

Not as evidence, given that no charges had been laid or ever would be. McCulloch just wanted the chair back at the detective office as a talking point.

Alphonse Gangitano was notorious in Carlton. Picture: Ben Swinnerton

In his three years at Carlton, McCulloch worked on some big cases. This included a brilliant sting by a slick team of fraudsters who used stolen house titles to swing massive loans from gullible banks.

Through a stroke of luck, McCulloch chanced on a lead that led to his arrest of a Canadian chef posing as an Orthodox Jew, who was one of the fraudsters’ frontmen posing as a legitimate bank borrower.

The crown of the chef’s head was shaved to the skin, with make-up applied to make it look as if he were genuinely balding.

The man stayed completely silent for days, refusing to say a word, let alone identify himself or anyone else.

But McCulloch was able to untangle the knot and find the thread that led him to arrest a notorious safecracker, “Fat Joe”, whose live-in lover was a well-known criminal barrister.

The safecracker’s accomplice was a European lawyer who fled to his homeland when the alarm was raised.

The scam finally played out in the County Court in 1992, where all but one of 238 witnesses were ready to testify.

The missing witness was a young courier who had been used by the gang to deliver bank documents and money anonymously. It turned out he had been murdered — but not by the bank fraud conspirators.

Fat Joe beat the rap and went home to his barrister bedmate. The chef, eventually identified as George Papp, was sentenced to four years and another conspirator, Paul Rancic, to six years. McCulloch was happy with that but not with everything else that was happening in Carlton.

McCulloch was down the street buying lunch one day when he noticed someone going into a deserted-looking shopfront with its windows blocked with drapes.

It looked like the front for an illegal brothel, so he went inside to check it. He surprised a well-dressed woman sitting behind a desk. She told him that the premises were used for her husband’s conveyancing business.

A police mugshot of Mario Condello. Picture: Supplied

He explained he was a new detective at Carlton and asked her name to put in his police diary to conform with regulations.

When she said her surname was Condello, McCulloch was surprised.

“Do you know Mario Rocco Condello?” he asked.

“That’s my husband,” she answered.

McCulloch got back into the car and within minutes a call came over the police radio from the station demanding that the unit with Lachlan McCulloch return to base at once.

As soon as he got inside, his boss hauled him into his office.

This was detective Sergeant Mark Wylie, who had been badly wounded in a shootout with the Russell St bombers. Wylie had grown up in the Ascot Vale area with the Moran crime family, who remained lifelong contacts for him. He looked daggers at McCulloch and asked him what the hell he was doing approaching Mario Condello.

McCulloch had heard of Condello, a bent lawyer turned gangster in the Carlton crew. But he was puzzled by his sergeant’s tough line of questioning. It seemed that Wylie thought McCulloch had some secret agenda.

“Why did I go there? Who sent me? What was I up to?”

The truth was simple. While waiting for a fellow officer to buy her lunch, he saw a dodgy-looking shopfront and decided to check it. It was obvious that Condello’s wife had called Wylie immediately to complain.

The clear lesson he took from his boss’s reaction was that Condello had a hotline to Carlton senior police. Which meant that other Carlton crew crooks like Alphonse Gangitano and the Morans probably had the same access.

Former undercover cop Lachlan McCulloch. Picture: Mark Stewart

Detective Sergeant Mark Wylie.

What did it mean? McCulloch wasn’t sure he wanted to know the full answer. But he knew that whenever he closed down an illegal gambling venue, the gaming machines he seized were mysteriously back “home” and racking up more profits before he had even done the paperwork and prepared a brief.

The Condello episode had a postscript. McCulloch was walking down Lygon St a few days later when a tall man suddenly stepped in front of him. It was Condello, who must have been tipped off that he was coming along the street and so waited to “ambush” him.

“Are you looking for me?” the bent lawyer asked in his best Hollywood gangster voice.

But he wasn’t the only one who had watched films.

McCulloch pushed him out of the way and said: “You’ll know when I want to speak to you…”

He’d stared down the mafia lawyer but he couldn’t ignore the conclusion: certain crooks were very cosy in Carlton.

That’s when he decided to apply for a vacancy at the drug squad. It seemed the logical progression for a whiz kid detective who had won his spurs in Richmond, St Kilda and Carlton, where drug-related crime dominated police work one way or another.

It didn’t occur to him that what had happened at Carlton would follow him into the crime squads. For all his street craft, he was still innocent in some ways.

As it turned out, he was jumping from frying pan to firing squad.