Deadline: Melbourne’s latest crime buzz with Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler

Crims know all too well that burying treasure close to home comes with risks. The latest crime buzz with Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler.

The latest crime buzz with Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler.

Cops and crooks have given the cunning dog a nickname — let’s say “the Wombat” — because he has a thick skin and digs holes to bury large sums of money. A risky strategy, because people on both sides of the law love digging up buried treasure. As in the case of Dragan “Machinegun Charlie” Arnautovic, whose stashes of cash and “product” at sports grounds led to frenzied overnight digs that left one place looking like a rabbit warren after his arrest.

Dragan Arnautovic, also known as Machinegun Charliefficker.

Then there’s another kickboxing armed robber who buried a huge cache of cash in a sealed plastic pipe in bush at Strath Creek, near Broadford. Sadly, the Black Saturday bushfires melted the lot.

Of course, as the Wombat knows, there are problems with stashing cash closer to home to avoid bushfires.

A scallywag turned up at his lawyer’s a few weeks ago with a story about police finding a million bucks in his freezer. He should have known that home appliances are the first places they look. Legend has it that searchers pinged $2m in a washing machine at a house linked with Tony “The Wig” Mokbel. The cash allegedly vanished. It sounds a little like the Oakleigh drug house burglary by bent police that led to the murder of Terry and Christine Hodson in 2004.

In 2011, an honest cleaner found close to $100,000 jammed in a sanitary bin in a toilet at Channel 9’s Docklands studios. Plumbers and police then found more banknotes blocking the pipes. When a possible “owner” declined to claim the cash, the honest janitor got $80,000, with the balance going to the state. An able-bodied man seen taking two duffle bags into that particular disabled toilet for five hours has no memory of it. Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well.

Melbourne’s western suburbs once had their own Angels, no Hell involved. Picture: AFP

EXPOSED AT LAST

No surprise there’s a bikie boss with tattoos on every inch except a bit below the bikini line. What is a little unusual is that this detail is now well-known because he has made increasingly brazen displays of his not-so-private parts to his many social media fans.

First up was a seemingly discreet photo of his luxury city digs taken at night. The reflection on a window might have gone unnoticed but for an eagle-eyed newswoman who picked over exposure at a glance. Since then, old mate has posted a seemingly innocuous shot of his cat taking a snooze, in which pussy isn’t the only thing in the frame.

There’s a pattern here.

Angels ain’t Angels, Oils ain’t oils, and not all Angels were Hells Angels. Before Skitzo and Stiffy and Hilly and Ball Bearing’s ghost get riled, they should recall some local bikie history.

Melbourne’s western suburbs had their own Angels, no Hell involved, way before Sonny Barger’s Hells Angels spread their wings from California to Australia in 1975.

The homegrown Angels rode mostly British bikes, Triumphs and Nortons and BSAs, drank beer and smoked Marlboros. Police and parents called them a gang but they called themselves a club.

The first time a Williamstown street kid called David King saw the Angels was in the summer of 1965 when he strayed into a shed full of motorbikes being worked on by a bloke blessed with a bikie name for the ages, Johnny Wilde. The Wilde one and his wife befriended the King kid. They’ve been mates ever since.

Whereas the Hells Angels of the USA had Hunter S.Thompson to write their story, the Angels of Footscray and Williamstown have Maureen Lane, a retired teacher who recently married the older and wiser David King. Maureen has helped the littlest Angel write a memoir about a slice of life now almost forgotten. It’s not all motorbikes and leather jackets. King became a soldier and a dockworker and ended up a chauffeur to the state governor (and visiting royalty), a trusted wheel man at Guv House.

When the Hells Angels came knocking in the late 1970s, King decided not to “patch over” and hung up his colours. It’s all in “Angels:

Life in an Australian Motorcycle Gang in the 60s and 70s”, published by Melbourne Books.

NO OFFENCE DETECTED

Busy racing stewards have headaches apart from the ongoing Sean Buckley saga — notably the collapsing case of trouble-prone trainer Richard Laming, charged with illicitly administering a drug to a horse on race day, strictly a no no. Following other brushes with the rules, Laming was charged over stomach tubing Jamaica Rain on Melbourne Cup day. But what seemed a watertight case has sprung a bigger leak than the Titanic. It was adjourned one day and scrapped the next.

Trouble-prone horse trainer Richard Laming.

No explanation, only a strained official statement apparently denying whispers it was because the case relied on surveillance footage suddenly found to be “compromised”.

Laming’s legal eagle Damian Sheales is shooting the lights out lately. The rumour is that hawk-eyed Sheales detected a strange glitch in certain recordings and so the person prosecuting the case pulled up immediately.

Police, meanwhile, are looking for troubled former trainer Tony Vasil to serve papers following his meltdown in a Gold Coast bar.

The man who once trained the champions Haradasun and Elvstroem was filmed punching two women who, it turns out, are related to a heavyweight bikie identity. Widely circulated footage of that fracas seems less ambiguous than evidence in the Laming case.

THE DIRT FILE

The player is a star on the field and what’s called a shite-magnet off it. That’s why his management will soon be deeply unhappy about their boy hanging with the bad company that good managers warn gun players against. Shades of Ben Cousins.