Deadline: Shane ‘Dr Ageless’ Charter still dirty on ASADA

Shane Charter had a fleeting reunion with ASADA before the Anthony Mundine retirement benefit. Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Shane Charter letting everyone know what he thinks of ASADA sign. Picture: Instagram

Melbourne’s top crime writers Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

WINNING NEVER GETS OLD

Boxing is the sweet science, so maybe controversial biochemist Shane “Dr Ageless” Charter is the sweet scientist.

The recently-married mystery man at the centre of the Essendon football supplements scandal apparently has an interest in middleweight mauler Michael “Pretty Boy” Zerafa, whose PhD is in TKO.

But when “Pretty Boy” euthanised wealthy aged pensioner Anthony “The Mouth” Mundine at Bendigo on Saturday it was hardly a test of Charter’s sports science.

A real test would have been to rejuvenate Mundine, loser in the greatest massacre since Wounded Knee.

Anthony Swords. Picture: Wayne Taylor

Dr Ageless, still dirty on anti-doping authorities, was snapped giving the finger to an ASADA door sign before the Mundine retirement benefit.

It seems he has got over the unwelcome interruption at his wedding to Caroline Bakker last month, where a process server approached him to serve legal papers — a bold move, given that overexposed biker Toby Mitchell and his little mate Jake King were in the party.

At Bendigo, there was more drama outside the ring than in it when hard man Anthony Swords took an urgent call at ringside from his brother, minding the ranch back home in Clyde North.

The brother had just sprung colourful racing identity Les Theodore trying to repossess the Range Rover supplied by Swords’ estranged employer Ultra Thoroughbreds, the Kilmore outfit run by Sean “Waxworks” Buckley.

The ageing “repo man”, equipped with spare keys, backed off while exchanging harsh words with the watchdog.

Theodore was filmed loitering around the property earlier in the day but otherwise got lucky. Lucky Anthony Swords wasn’t home — and that he isn’t the type to go after against an old timer.

WHEN PARTIES GET ROUGH

Don’t take a knife to a gun fight, they say.

A nervy young man had both pulled on him at a wake in Gippsland the other day, which really woke him up. It was that sort of funeral.

The young mourner survived the threat of bullets and blades but some don’t.

Such as Irish visitor Patrick Brendon Coghlan, shot dead at a party in Reservoir in the summer of 1983, reputedly for cracking a joke.

The shooter was prolific hitman and knife artist Rodney Charles “the Duke” Collins, alias Rodney Earl, who also shot the party host, Ronald Longmuir.

When police smashed a window at Collins’s Broadmeadows house to arrest him, they took a few extra seconds because of plastic film over the glass. Inside, they found a revolver which had misfired on every shell in its cylinder. Collins had been trying to shoot them but the faulty weapon saved them.

A worse for wear Rodney Collins poses for a police mug shot.

No such luck for Gregory John Workman, whose shooting death at a gangster party in St Kilda in 1995 is often counted as the first of the “Gangland War”, mainly because the shooter was prominent player Alphonse “The Plastic Godfather” Gangitano.

Two female witnesses in the case were lured from alleged police “protection” in a caravan park and sent on a long European holiday at Big Al’s expense.

Gangitano’s old friend Graham “the Munster” Kinniburgh impressed guests at the wedding of a relative of his to someone from a respectable “squarehead” family.

In his speech, he came across all Marlon Brando mobster. There was even a brief scene on the dance floor when a guest fresh out of jail told a property developer to stop dancing with a certain young woman or cop a bullet.

Then there is the veteran rocker (name deleted), hired to entertain at the “christening” of Carl and Roberta Williams’ daughter Dhakota at Crown.

He holed up in a room with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label and declined to perform right up until a guest told him to get his Arkansas Grass downstairs and start singing, or else.

A clue to the identity of the gun-shy performer: it wasn’t Brian Mannix.

ROUGH TRADE

Rogue males have always had admirers.

Anyone who sits in a prison waiting room sees a collection of strangely loyal women waiting to see mostly troublesome men.

The appeal of the desperate and dangerous leads to odd and sometimes fatal attractions.

Bail justice (and athlete and pioneer female footy umpire) Rowena Alsop was such a special friend of the late Alphonse Gangitano that she spoke at his funeral, gushing about his Dolce & Gabbana cologne, poetry and other matters.

Criminal barrister Zara Garde-Wilson, descended from an old establishment family, fell hard for a handsome homicidal hombre named Lewis Caine, shot dead by hired guns.

Zarah Garde-Wilson.

The Hyphen wanted permission to have sperm taken from Caine’s body but it wasn’t to be. She would later become close to Tony Mokbel.

Zara arrived on the Melbourne scene too late to fall for amorous armed robber Graeme Jensen, whose shooting by police triggered a mad-dog response from fellow crim Victor Peirce and his vicious crew.

History might have played out differently, preventing the Walsh St shootings, if Peirce had known then what he found out later: his friend Jensen was committing lewd acts on the sly with Victor’s wife Wendy.

Pierce’s mother, crime matriarch Kath Pettingill, had many children to many men. A longtime brothel operator who paid off bent cops in cash or kind, Kath and her evil brood and Walsh St inspired the film Animal Kingdom.

The real Kath was in the middle of farewelling one of Australia’s most wanted men, Lance Chee, when detectives arrived.

She rolled her eyes at the drawn guns and said: “He’s going away for a long time, boys — let him finish.”

Beat that, Jacki Weaver.

DIRT FILE

The proprietor at an inner western massage parlour harangues locals queuing for coffee at a nearby cafe to move along because happy families hanging around her door are bad for business.

Last thing she wants for her place is a good name.

HEARD SOMETHING? LET US KNOW AT [e-mail]