Ron Medich: the man with the motive
Michael McGurk’s murder may be traced back to Ron Medich’s falling out with brother Roy, when things began to unravel.
Ron Medich shook his head and stared from the dock of a King Street courtroom. He looked angry but also shell-shocked. After an epic nine years and two trials, the Sydney property developer was found guilty yesterday of masterminding the execution-style killing of his former business partner Michael McGurk.
For a man accustomed to using his wealth to get his way, the fall was complete as he was led away in handcuffs and faced the brutal prospect, at 70, of dying in jail.
There would be no more business deals to rezone land and build apartments. No more political donations to help grease the wheels. No more boozy long lunches with underlings and the odd pollie such as Ian Macdonald, himself now residing in a fine correctional establishment. No more afternoon brothel visits. No more luxury living with younger wife Odetta in the comfort of their eastern suburbs Point Piper home. In fact, no more Odetta: she now lives on the Riviera.
How did it all unravel? One reason could be traced to how Medich lost the steadying hand of his brother Roy when the pair fell out and ended their business partnership more than a decade ago.
On his own, Ron Medich’s judgment was erratic and frequently flawed. He invested millions in ventures that failed and then relied on others, notably McGurk, to collect bad debts and carry out retribution.
Medich kept company with other characters of dubious reputation. He counted among his advisers Fortunato “Lucky” Gattellari, a former boxer and, like McGurk, someone well acquainted with the finer arts of collecting outstanding debts.
Another was Senad Kaminic, a former Bosnian soldier who stood well over six feet tall and cut a viciously intimidating figure with his long ponytail and all-black suits. Officially Kaminic worked as Gattellari’s driver, but he was kept close in Medich’s circle.
It would be a falling-out of explosive proportions with McGurk, a Scottish-born businessman, that would finally bring Medich undone. All seemed well in 2007, not long after Medich had split with his brother, with McGurk as hired help to recoup money owed. He was successful in recovering $11.5 million owed to Medich by Paul Mathieson, owner of payday lending company Amazing Loans.
But in his fury over a rash of poor investment decisions, Medich soon turned on McGurk. An attempt to force money out of Adam and Sally-Anne Tilley when they fell behind on loan repayments for a former Medich home at Point Piper went sour when legal action in the NSW Supreme Court run by McGurk failed.
At one stage, McGurk won power of attorney over the property, but it was soon revoked. Things went from bad to worse when McGurk was charged in January 2009 over the firebombing of the couple’s home. Medich paid McGurk’s $100,000 bail but he soon withdrew the surety, claiming McGurk was at fault and owed him millions.
As their disagreement deepened, Medich sued McGurk. Amid claim and cross-claim, Medich’s anger turned toxic.
In September 2009, McGurk was shot through the back of the head with a .22-calibre weapon equipped with a silencer. He was with his nine-year-old son, having just stepped out of his Mercedes at his Cremorne home after returning from buying takeaway chicken and chips for dinner from Mosman’s Charcoal Charlie’s.
It was natural that police investigators would turn their sights on the property developer: he was arrested little more than a year later, on October 13, 2010.
Medich’s 10-week trial in the NSW Supreme Court, which ended with yesterday’s conviction, could be boiled down to one question: Can you trust a criminal? The 11 jurors chose to trust the word of “Lucky” Gattellari, the key rollover witness against Medich.
Gattellari, 68, spent weeks in the witness box. It was a seat he knew well from the first trial, when a jury was discharged after failing to come to unanimous decision. Gattellari, who is serving a discounted sentence after pleading guilty over his role in the McGurk murder, told a compelling story of his connections to Medich.
The trail, the prosecution would claim, always led to one man, Medich, with the motive to murder.
For years, Gattellari had been Medich’s closest colleague. He had worked at Eling Forest Winery in the NSW southern highlands, using hundreds of thousands of dollars in undocumented loans from Medich to fund the business. They spent a lot of time in restaurants, clubs, massage parlours and at the races, Gattellari told the court. They were on the phone to each other daily.
When Medich fell out with McGurk, Gattellari relished taking over the role as prime fixer. “Was there anyone closer than you to the accused?” crown prosecutor Sharon Harris asked Gattellari. “I don’t think there was,” he replied.
Gattellari recalled Medich complaining bitterly about McGurk when their relationship went wrong.
Money aside, facing humiliation among the eastern suburbs set seemed foremost in Medich’s mind. “This f..king bastard is ruining my life,” Medich raged, according to Gattellari. “People in the eastern suburbs think I’m a fool.”
Gattellari said he was there for it all. Kaminic was there too, though there were slight differences in what they remembered. Kaminic recalled Medich saying over lunch in Leichhardt: “If I had a gun, I would kill him.”
Eventually, Gattellari said, Medich asked him whether he could “possibly help him out finding someone to kill the bastard”. The old Italian former lightweight boxing champion protested: “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” According to Gattellari, Medich replied: “F..king oath, I do.”
There were two secret payments of $250,000, Gattellari said, each paid in cash and given to him at Medich’s Point Piper home. Haissam Safetli, the brother of an employee at Gattellari’s light-fitting company, and Christopher Estephan, a then teenage associate, were to carry out the murder. While on a trip to New Zealand, Medich’s former friend Paul Mathieson said Medich reassured him McGurk “won’t be a problem for much longer. I’ll fix him up.”
Months passed and McGurk’s legal battle with Medich intensified. “I gave you all this f..king money,” Gattellari recalled Medich shouting at him, “and the guy’s still walking around”. There was a mysterious car crash that left Medich shaken and upset. He was convinced someone had “deliberately run into him”. Gattellari told Kaminic, who was dealing directly with the two killers, that “if there was a time to do it, now would be a good time”.
On September 3, 2009, Gattellari said he was at home when he learned McGurk was dead.
“When did you first learn that the deceased had been killed?” Harris asked Gattellari. “A news item,” he replied.
The next morning, Gattellari was on the way to see Medich when he said to Kaminic: “F..k, I think they’ve done it.”
Gattellari recalled asking Medich: “Are you happy now?” According to Gattellari, Medich replied: “It’s taken f..king long enough, and look at the shit it’s caused.”
After the media maelstrom that followed had died down, it became clear to Medich that McGurk’s wife, Kimberley, had no intention of ending her husband’s legal disputes and paying him. “He (McGurk) is causing me more problems dead than alive,” Matthew Crockett, another associate of Gattellari, recalled Medich saying.
On August 8, 2010, McGurk’s widow had a solidly built male visitor wearing a wig at the door of her north shore home.
“Do the right thing and pay your husband’s debts,” the man said. “You know what you need to do.”
But by that time a police investigation was advanced. They knew the intimidation was coming and were sitting in Kimberley McGurk’s lounge room.
The conspiracy unwound further. “The guilt’s killing me. I can’t live with it,” Safetli told Gattellari and Kaminic on October 13, 2010. “If this all collapses ... if we all get arrested or something, is Ron going to look after you?”
Safetli was wearing a police wire when he visited Gattellari and Kaminic at their factory in southwest Sydney that day. Gattellari replied, after a pause: “They’re trying to get everyone to turn on everybody.” Then, abruptly: “They’re not going to be able to convict me, not on hearsay, even if you f..ken point the finger at me.”
Moments later police swooped and arrested them all. On May 10, 2013, Gattellari was sentenced to at least seven years and six months in jail for his role in the murder. He was given a 60 per cent discount for helping police. Kaminic was sentenced to 4½ years in prison, receiving a 50 per cent discount.
It was never made clear who fired the fatal shot, Safetli or the teenage Estephan. Safetli, who claimed Estephan was the killer, served seven years in jail and was released in November. Estephan served five years.
Glen McNamara, the man who, with infamous former detective Roger Rogerson, murdered 20-year-old university student Jamie Gao over several kilograms of the drug ice, said he met Gattellari for five minutes while the pair were in jail. He told the court Gattellari confessed to lying at the preliminary hearing of the Medich trial, but McNamara admitted he had made no notes at the time about the confession and, as a former private investigator, knew that was important to do.
At Medich’s first trial last year, Kimberley McGurk walked out after giving her evidence and did not return to watch proceedings. In the second trial, however, she sat metres from Medich’s relatives, stony faced, with her children on either side. In breaks, the two families sat having coffee in the same cafe. It was strangely civilised.
In court, Medich sat in the dock looking tanned and meticulously dressed in a black suit, white shirt and tie. The central thrust of his defence, argued by Winston Terracini SC, was that Gattellari was a liar. In his closing remarks to the jury, judge Geoffrey Bellew summed up: “The crown case rests largely on accepting the reliability of a single witness, namely, Lucky Gattellari. In a case such as that, the law requires me to give you a direction that you should exercise caution.”
Terracini had hammered his point repeatedly. Gattellari, he said, was full of “bluster, bravado and lie upon lie”, and was “prepared to lie to anybody for the purposes of looking after himself”. He “told so many lies it was impossible to determine when he was lying and when he was telling the truth”.
It came down to competing opposites: Gattellari’s inherent untrustworthiness for the defence; Medich’s powerful motivation to kill for the prosecution.
Terracini tried to downplay his client’s motive, referring to eastern suburbs gibes as he claimed “no amount of embarrassment could cause one person to want to kill another”. He told the jury one disagreement between Medich and McGurk — over the Tilleys’ Point Piper property debt — had been settled favourably for his client.
Likewise, the prosecution played down their star witness’s credibility by saying it was supported by other verifiable facts, including phone records and bank statements. Gattellari was “not the boy scout, not the upstanding member of the community”, prosecutor Harris said. He was “the person prepared to break the rules, chase your outstanding debts, and someone who is beholden to you for their lifestyle”. But she added: “If you were the accused, you would turn to Lucky Gattellari, and that is exactly what he did.”
When the jury foreman read out the findings — guilty of masterminding the contract killing and guilty of later intimidation of McGurk’s widow — it seemed only Medich was surprised.
Outside court, Kimberley McGurk stood next to the son who witnessed his father’s murder. “The damage to my family will never be repaired but the result today will allow my family to move forward,” she said.
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Timeline of trials
2009
SEP 3: Michael McGurk, 45, gunned down outside his Sydney home
2010
AUG 8: Kimberley McGurk intimidated at her home by a stranger who says she shouldn’t be a thief like her husband and should pay her debts
OCT 13: Lucky Gattellari, Senad Kaminic, Haissam
Safetli and Christopher Estephan arrested over the murder
OCT 27: Ron Medich charged
DEC 17: Medich granted bail, released from jail three days later
2013
MAY 10: Gattellari sentenced to at least seven years six months after admitting organising the murder, receiving
a 60 per cent discount for his guilty plea and helping authorities
MAY 10: Kaminic, Gattellari’s driver and occasional standover man, sentenced to at least two years six months after pleading guilty to being an accessory after the fact, receiving a
50 per cent discount
AUG 6: Medich’s committal hearing begins
AUG 9: Safetli jailed for at least seven years after pleading guilty to murder and intimidation – crown says he was “likely” to have been the shooter
SEP 27: Medich ordered to stand trial
2014
APR 30: Estephan, Safetli’s getaway driver, sentenced to at least five years after admitting firearm offences and being an accessory after the fact
2016
JULY 5: Jury discharged before Medich trial starts after extensive new material handed to the defence by the prosecution
2017
JAN 30: Medich’s murder and intimidation trial starts in NSW Supreme Court
MAR 24:Jury retires
APR 13: Jury discharged after being unable to reach a verdict
2018
JAN 30: Medich’s retrial starts
APRIL 11: Jury retires
APRIL 23: The jury of 11 men finds Medich guilty of both charges after deliberating for 5 1/2 days. Medich taken into custody, to be sentenced at a later date
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