Underworld rivalries: Carl Williams vs the Morans

Jason Moran was so cocky after shooting Carl Williams that he rang him to ask for the bullet back. He’d soon learn he had underestimated his rival.

Carl Williams made wiping out the Morans his main objective.

• In a new series we look at the biggest rivalries of Melbourne’s underworld

Many criminal disputes have reached flashpoint in parks and other secluded spots of Melbourne’s northwest in the past two decades.

The price of avoiding prying eyes can be vulnerability and plenty have left a late-night rendezvous with bullet wounds and a drive to the Northern Hospital in Epping to be patched up.

But none of the many shootings would have the repercussions of the evening Carl Williams was wounded at Gladstone Park by Mark and Jason Moran.

October 13, 1999, was Carl’s 29th birthday and he and the brothers had arranged an after-dark catch-up in a nondescript reserve off Barrington Crescent to thrash out some friction over a pill press.

The meeting was abruptly terminated with some shouting, followed by a gunshot which left a slug in Williams’ stomach.

Jason Moran.

Mark Moran.

The birthday boy made a trip home, then, reluctantly, to hospital before police made some futile inquiries about what had happened.

The victim offered a laughable explanation for his injuries but the countdown clock was already ticking for the Morans.

Mark and Jason – unaccustomed to people prepared to have a crack in return – were later to find they had fatally underestimated Williams.

Not that their foe was in any hurry.

Williams bided his time for eight months – a period punctuated by a phone call from Jason telling him he wanted back the bullet he’d put in his stomach.

Then the game changed, fast.

Mark Moran was ambushed at his Aberfeldie home, killed in seconds as a gunman opened fire with a shotgun followed by a pistol.

Mark Moran lies dead in his ute outside his Aberfeldie home.

It was immediately known Williams was behind the hit and that Mark and Jason had erred in merely wounding him at Gladstone Park.

“They should have killed him,” the brothers’ uncle Des would later ruefully tell an associate.

Carl later turned his attention to Mark’s younger brother.

There were stories of Jason being chased in his car through the streets by a gunman in another vehicle.

On a visit to the Williams’ Hillside home during that era, the Herald Sun noted someone – probably linked to the Morans – had recently redecorated the property with bullet-holes.

Jason eventually appeared to come to believe it was a fight he could not win.

Williams had grown in strength and surrounded himself with a small army of soldiers willing to do whatever it took to advance the interests of their boss.

It was said that Jason became increasingly concerned, taking a trip overseas and increasingly seeing himself as a marked man.

He had taken to moving around with a bodyguard, Pasquale Barbaro, in the period before the deadly events which unfolded at Cross Keys Reserve in Essendon on June 21, 2003.

Even the fretful Moran, with a pistol tucked down the front of his pants, probably thought that he’d be safe at a kids’ footy clinic.

Bullet holes and blood mark the van in which Jason Moran was gunned down.

If he did, he was to be proved fatally wrong when a masked mate of Williams suddenly appeared at the driver’s door and opened fire with a shotgun.

Moran and Barbaro died where they sat, a van load of kids in the back seat witnessing the whole thing.

Others would die amid Williams’ quest to get square or protect himself from those loyal to the Morans.

By the end of the gangland war, Mark and Jason’s father Lewis and close family associate Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh would have died at the hands of Team Williams’ triggermen.

Williams would later be jailed for underworld killings, including the Moran-Barbaro atrocity, and died at the hands of prison gang boss Matthew Charles Johnson in 2010.

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