Growing up in the crossfire

THEY were born into a world of violence and death — a life they didn’t choose.

Foxtel

THEY were born into a world of violence and death — a life they didn’t choose.

WHEN notorious underworld figurehead Jason Moran and his associate Pasquale Barbaro were brutally gunned down in front of Moran’s petrified children at a junior football clinic in 2003, it sparked a terrifying new chapter in Melbourne’s bloody gangland wars.

A lone hooded gunman sprayed the 35-year-old’s car with bullets as his twins, Christian and Memphis — then aged six — and three other youngsters cowered in the backseat, breaking an unwritten underworld code that kept the wives and children of warring figureheads out of harm’s way.

Tragically, the traumatised children of the Carlton Crew drugs baron were not the first or the last innocent young casualties caught in the crossfire as two notorious mob families fought for control of Melbourne’s illicit drug trade.

By the time the bloody underworld feud ended in 2010 with the brutal murder of Carl Williams, who organised the hit on his bitter rival Moran, one more child was left mourning her father, who became the last victim in a 12-year war that claimed 36 lives.

Today the children born into a world they did not choose still live with the legacy of their father’s sins; their names forever synonymous with a war that turned Australia’s most liveable city into the nation’s crime capital.

DHAKOTA WILLIAMS

Dhakota Williams was only 10 years old when her father, Carl Williams, was bludgeoned to death behind the bars of Barwon Prison. He was serving 35 years for the murders of Jason Moran, his father Lewis Moran and underworld associate Michael Marshall.

The little girl’s grief-stricken face at her father’s funeral as she remembered her doting daddy was a sobering reminder of the invisible casualties of what her mother Roberta Williams refers to as “the war years”.

“I’m happy with who my family are,” Dhakota, now 17, recently revealed on national TV.

“I’m not saying it’s good … It just makes me different. It makes me who I am.”

Born into a feud that began when the Morans shot her father in the stomach, Dhakota grew up stockpiling Father’s Day gifts for her jailbird dad that prison rules forbade her from giving to him.

The little girl was keeping them for the day he was released, not realising she would be an adult perhaps with children of her own by then.

She was too young to remember the procession of underworld funerals, or the family fleeing to a safe house fearing they might be the next victims of the bloody battle raging on Melbourne’s streets.

However, she and her older sisters from her mother’s previous marriage, Danielle and Breanane, would not forget growing up in a house bugged by police listening devices, or dressing behind towels in case hidden cameras were watching them.

“The children are the ones who have been hurt the most,” Roberta once conceded. “On both sides.”

Today Dhakota, who dreams of becoming a lawyer, recently lost her bid to inherit the $1 million home left to her by her late gangland grandfather, George Williams. The property, which has been shot at and firebombed and was where her grandmother Barbara Williams took her own life, has been seized by the Australian Taxation Office to pay a longstanding family debt.

CHRISTIAN AND MEMPHIS MORAN

Like Dhakota Williams, Jason Moran’s twins Christian and Memphis were shielded from media in the aftermath of their father’s execution when their mother Trisha took them to live in another state.

The twins, who survived the gunfire which claimed their father and his friend, were spared the publicity surrounding the 2010 trial of their infamous gangland grandmother, Judy Moran, then 65, who was jailed for her role in the murder of her brother-in-law, Des “Tuppence” Moran.

BLAISE ARMOUR

But their cousin Blaise Armour, who was also in the car that day, grew up haunted by what he had witnessed at 11, finding himself on the wrong side of the law in 2012 on drugs charges.

Armour, then 20, was given an adjourned undertaking after admitting possessing items for the manufacture of a drug, a Melbourne court hearing about the youngster’s “tumultuous upbringing”.

His mother, Suzanne Kane, had been charged as an accessory in Des Moran’s murder and was handed a two-year wholly-suspended sentence. He had also only recently discovered his father was Geoffrey “Nutts” Armour, the killer who is currently now serving 26 years for the crime.

Armour’s lawyer told the court that the gangland murders had had a profound impact on his life and that he was returning to Perth to resume his accounting studies.

BRITTANY MOKBEL

Similarly, Brittany Mokbel, the teenage daughter of notorious gangland figurehead Tony Mokbel, has also appeared in court, though for far less dramatic offences than the crimes which put her high-profile father behind bars for 30 years.

Brittany, now 22, received a good behaviour bond and was banned from driving for speeding offences, the court hearing she too had been bullied at school because her father was once Australia’s most wanted fugitive.

Born in Greece while her parents were on the run, Brittany now works in Melbourne as a hairdresser carrying the name and the legacy of her father who was once the head of The Company, Australia’s biggest drug cartel.

Mokbel’s older daughter Suzy, from his first marriage to Carmel DeLorenzo, is also a hairdresser and lives in Melbourne where she runs her own studio.

She recently told journalists her childhood with was unremarkable.

“I don’t think it was different at all,” Suzy recently told Melbourne media.

“Define most childhoods growing up?”

ELLIE GANGITANO

Meanwhile Ellie Gangitano, the daughter of Carlton Crew standover man Alphonse Gangitano, who in 1998 became the first victim of the gangland wars, has been making headlines as a talented actress.

Ellie, who once made her debut in Neighbours as a toddler, recently starred in The Doctor Blake Mysteries, while her sister Amelia lives a quieter life out of the spotlight with her partner Tristan and baby daughter.

Originally published as Growing up in the crossfire