The bullet that started the underworld war

It weighed just a couple of grams and was fired from a couple of metres, but the tiny .22 bullet that lodged in the guts of a then little-known gangster 25 years ago would start the “Underbelly War” that would cost more than a dozen lives and is still being played out today.

Seven prime ministers ago on Wednesday, October 13, 1999, three men with large egos and small guns met at a children’s playground in Barrington Crescent, Gladstone Park.

John Silvester with the bullet that hit Carl Williams.Credit: Simon Schluter

It was an incredibly dumb place to start a deadly feud, but some crooks, then and now, are incredibly dumb.

The playground was open, small and surrounded by suburban houses, not the ideal place to shoot someone in the guts.

The bullet that hit Carl Williams.Credit: Simon Schluter

The three men, Mark Moran, Jason Moran and Carl Williams, would go on to make hundreds of headlines before making headstones, all because they forgot that in the underworld, bullets are usually bad for business. In other words, hubris and handguns don’t mix.

A day or so before the playground ambush, Williams met a mate who has been given the code name “Mr Thomas” at the Gladstone Park Hotel and talked about the proposed meeting.

Carl was getting into the drug market and had a pill press that Mark wanted. Williams wanted to disable it so the Morans would lose interest.

Carl was undercutting the Morans’ pill price and bad-mouthing Jason’s product, persuading some of the Morans’ clients to jump ship.

Williams told Thomas he was to meet the Morans. Carl and Mark had been mates and, if left to their own devices, probably could have come to a compromise. But Jason was never a calm negotiator.

“The fact that Jason was going to the meeting concerned me as I knew that Jason and Carl did not get along,” Thomas confessed to police when he also decided to jump ship.

The playground where Carl Williams was shot 25 years ago.Credit: Justin McManus

Thomas was Williams’ trusted lieutenant, who provided advice and guns, and even was the driver in some of his underworld hits.

“I also knew Mark Moran, and had met him on a few occasions. He was a gentleman. I had also met Jason a few times and knew that he was a loose cannon.”

Jason Moran. Still with the lump on his head from the butt of a police pistol.Credit: Matthew Bouwmeester

The rule for the meeting was no guns, but crooks make a living by breaking the rules. Jason was hiding a .22 calibre pistol, while Carl had a .45 handgun tucked in his bum bag.

They arrived at the park together when Mark chose an unsubtle method to break the deadlock. Thomas told police: “Carl said that Mark then hit him over the head with a lump of wood [probably a cosh]. Carl said that he fell to the ground and that Jason shot him in the stomach. Carl said that Mark was telling Jason to shoot Carl in the head to finish him off, but Jason didn’t do it.”

Having relieved Williams of his negotiating position, they relieved him of his handgun.

If Jason had killed Williams, odds were that with no witnesses it would just be another unsolved murder of a would-be gangster. But Jason thought a slug in the guts would bring Williams into line, like a smack on the nose to a disobedient pet. Then he would hand over the pill press, a fair amount of cash compensation and mind his own business while they got on with their business.

Carl went to his parents’ house, where his mother, Barbara, had baked him a chocolate cake as it was his 29th birthday. He declined a piece as he had lost his appetite. His next treat was likely to be hospital jelly.

After the bullet was removed, Carl refused to spill his injured guts to the cops who visited him in recovery (they already knew it was Jason). His version was that he was walking along when he felt a twinge, popped into hospital as a precaution and was as surprised as anyone else that he had a lead slug in his tummy.

In hospital, he dwelled on Mark’s call to shoot him in the head and believed it was only a matter of time until that happened. He then decided to kill them all. That was the beginning of the underworld war.

Thomas confirmed to police: “After that incident, Carl was totally obsessed with getting back at the Morans. He wanted both Mark and Jason Moran dead, along with their father Lewis Moran.”

Four years later I would ask Carl who shot him. The years had not improved his memory. In fairness, he may have had more important matters on his mind when we met. He had put out a contract on a Moran associate, Graham Kinniburgh, that had been carried out the day before our coffee date.

He said he had no idea who had shot him, but his claims seemed half-hearted, not expecting to convince me. “I have no idea who shot me, and I’ve never asked … I don’t know who did it. Police told me who they think did it, but that’s their business.”

Carl Williams is arrested by Purana and goes guts up. The beginning of the end.Credit: Angela Wylie

When I said the cops knew it was Jason, he smirked, replying: “You better ask them.”

He also denied any involvement in the murder of Kinniburgh – again it was half-hearted. “I’ve never met him, and I’ve never heard a bad thing said about him. I have nothing to profit from his death. It’s a mystery to me. I haven’t done anything. My conscience is clear.”

He went further, saying he had nothing against Lewis Moran. “I’ve only met Lewis once. I haven’t got a problem with Lewis. If he thinks he has a problem with me, I can say he can sleep peacefully.” It was Carl’s kiss of death. Four months later, Lewis Moran was dead, gunned down inside the Brunswick Club.

Truth was Williams wanted notoriety and wanted people to know he was behind the murders to build his reputation without leaving enough evidence for him to be charged.

It was a dangerous trapeze act with no net and, ultimately, he would fall to his death – but that would be in the future.

The first hit would be on Mark Moran while Jason was in prison.

It was not Williams’ first rodeo. It was in June 2000 that Mark Moran was murdered outside his Aberfeldie house, but a month earlier Williams and his mates almost certainly murdered underworld heavy Richard Mladenich in a St Kilda boarding house.

He owed Williams $120,000 for drugs and had rejected an offer to work for Carl, preferring to join the Moran clan. Maybe they wanted to get him so he could not go after them when they killed Mark.

Thomas told police: “After Mark was murdered, Carl was constantly saying ‘one down two to go’. By that, I took it to mean that one Moran was dead and that Jason and Lewis were still to go. Everyone knew that Carl was involved in Mark’s murder.”

The Brunswick Club where Lewis Moran (right) was shot dead on March 31, 2004.Credit: The Age

Williams’ trusted lieutenant-turned-police-informer told detectives that Carl had a team of soldiers carrying out surveillance on the Morans and their associates. At different times Williams had access to six hit teams with 11 killers.

Lewis Moran put out a contract on Williams, but Moran was a known tight arse and the offer was well under market rates.

One of Williams’ hit teams ambushed Jason Moran and his mate Pasquale Barbaro as they sat in a van at a kids’ Auskick session in Essendon North in June 2003, and another team killed Lewis Moran at the Brunswick Club in March 2004.

How many people died on the orders of Williams? We reckon 13 – including seven in nine months during 2003.

Police examine the van in which Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro were murdered.Credit: Paul Harris

While Lewis Moran was tight with money, Williams was stupid, shortchanging his hit-teams more than once, which was short-sighted because Carl’s failure to pay would come at an enormous cost.

Faced with decades in jail, some of his paid assassins turned on him. Eventually, Williams was found guilty, or was forced to plead guilty to four counts of murder – Michael Marshall, Jason Moran, Lewis Moran and Mark Mallia. In 2007 Williams was sentenced to a minimum of 35 years.

He had destroyed the Moran clan but at what cost? Although it must be said, the Morans contributed to their own demise with Lewis’ ex-wife Judy organising the murder of her brother-in-law Des in a plot worthy of a musical comedy.

After a few false starts, Williams wanted a deal. He would make a statement against former detective Paul Dale over the murders of police informer Terence Hodson and his wife Christine in exchange for a sentence discount. (Dale has always maintained his innocence over those murders.)

Williams believed giving up a cop was not breaking the underworld code of silence. But he was wrong.

If he had made a full confession, he could have implicated others for the Mladenich killing.

Pallbearers carry Carl Williams’ gold-plated coffin outside at St Therese’s church in Essendon. The funeral directors were never paid and the ornamental cross was stolen.Credit: Jason South

In 2010 Carl Williams was bashed to death in Barwon Prison by Matthew “The General” Johnson.

The Underbelly War was over, with both sides destroyed. Crooks have short memories, and we are in the middle of another over the illicit tobacco industry, and now, as was the case 25 years ago, there will be no winners.

Except for undertakers, headline writers and crime columnists.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.