Pubdate: Sat, 01 Apr 2006
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2006 The Age Company Ltd
Contact:  http://www.theage.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5
Author: John Silvester

THE RISE OF A DRUG LORD

Underworld godfather Tony Mokbel would have lost his liberty this week
- - but he is not around to serve his jail term. John Silvester profiles
the small man who wanted big things.

It was just a little stumble that spilt the tin that caused the fire
that led to the explosion that brought the firemen who called the
police who found the amphetamine laboratory that Tony built.

The lab, in a quiet residential street in Brunswick, had proved to be
a virtual goldmine, pumping out speed until the day Paul Edward Howden
kicked over a bucket of solvents that ignited and burnt the house down
in February 1997. Police didn't have far to look for the main suspect.
They found Howden at The Alfred hospital being treated for severe
burns to 30 per cent of his body.

Police also discovered the lab had produced 41.25 kilograms of pure
methylamphetamine with a potential street value of $78 million.
Prosecutors claimed the clandestine operation had produced enough
speed for 1.3 million users. "It is the largest seizure of
methylamphetamine in Victoria and it's the largest detected
manufacture of methylamphetamine in the state," the County Court was
told. Even the trial judge, Graeme Crossley, seemed impressed. "I
can't believe how big it is," he said.

Howden's barrister, the energetic Con Heliotis, QC, told the court his
client was just a minor player who agreed to the plan out of loyalty
to a friend  the godfather to one of his three children  identified
only as "Tony". For his work in the massively profitable enterprise,
Heliotis claimed Howden was paid just $10,000 in home
renovations.

Police agreed that Howden, a plumber by trade, was the stooge of the
operation and Heliotis helpfully added that his client was "just short
of stupid". When he jailed Howden for four years, Judge Crossley took
into account his minnow status: "You were a factory roustabout rather
than the managing director."

The managing director was Godfather Tony  who was never formally
identified in court  but police needed only to look over the badly
charred side fence to solve the mystery. The house next door was one
of many owned by the Mokbel family.

Tony Mokbel was said to have lost millions when the lab was discovered
but he was a master at finding advantage in adversity. While the court
was told Howden was the official owner of the speed lab house the
property was soon absorbed into the growing Mokbel Empire. The
extended Mokbel family knocked down the burnt shell to extend their
garden, planting a mature palm worth $15,000 to go with the new
swimming pool. Long before Tony Mokbel became the public face of drug
dealing in Victoria, children in the street referred to the
million-dollar property as "the drug house".

Meanwhile, Howden, the burnt patsy, would never tell detectives who
funded the venture  and "Tony" would not forget his loyalty. During
Howden's sentence Mokbel would regularly drive to the jail to visit,
even persuading prison officers to let him take his friend for an
unauthorised trip to a local McDonald's for a break from prison food.

When Howden, 36, died of heart disease in December 2001 Mokbel placed
a death notice in the Herald Sun that read in part: "You will always
be in my prayers and I will never ever forget you. I promise to you my
friend to be there for your family till the day I die." It was a
Mokbel trademark. You never forget a friend  or an enemy.

While police had known for years that Mokbel was involved in drug
manufacturing it was the Brunswick lab fire that showed that the
businessman on the make had become a major player in the underworld.
Yesterday Tony Mokbel was finally sentenced to a minimum of nine years
in prison after he was found guilty of cocaine trafficking, but he was
not in court to hear his fate. Mokbel jumped bail days before his
trial was completed. He is now Australia's most wanted man.

ANTONIOS SAJIH MOKBEL WAS ONE OF the sharper students at Coburg's
racially diverse Moreland High School in the late 1970s but he was
never going to push on to tertiary study. The boy with the rich
Lebanese heritage and traditional Australian tastes was always in a
hurry to make money. His first full-time job was as a dishwasher at a
suburban nightclub before he became a waiter, later working security,
a surprising choice for a man no bigger that a football rover. But
Mokbel was smooth. He found he could often persuade people to his
point of view without overt violence.

Like many ambitious young men on the make, Mokbel soon realised that
if he were to acquire the sort of money he wanted, he would have to
make his own running. It was in those early years, too, that Mokbel
noticed that people partying often lost their inhibitions, and were
prepared to pay well for a good time.

In 1984, aged just 19, he bought his first business  a struggling
Rosanna milk bar. For two years he and his young partner, Carmel  whom
he would marry in 1989 and with whom he would have two children
worked long hours seven days a week battling to make a living before
finally selling out for their original investment price.

It would be the one and only time Mokbel didn't seem to make massive
profits in his business ventures, despite an early police report
saying he "lacked financial acumen".

In 1987 he bought an Italian restaurant in Boronia. In those days he
was content to roll the dough  years later he was rolling in it. He
steadily built the business, expanding when he bought the shop next
door. He sold the restaurant as a going concern in 1994 but kept
ownership of the building.

In 1997 he opened T Jays Restaurant in Sydney Road, Brunswick, after
buying several adjoining properties and he started to be noticed as an
ambitious developer with an appetite for consuming businesses. By 2000
the former struggling milk bar proprietor bragged to friends he owned
or controlled 38 different companies.

In the same year he began his most ambitious development. An $18
million 10-storey "winged keel" apartment tower over Sydney Road. The
plan was to build 120 apartments and townhouses, offices, restaurants,
gym with pool and a four-storey car park on the old Whelan the Wrecker
site. No one seemed to wonder how he could generate that sort of money.

At the same time he was also developing 10 units in Templestowe that
he planned to sell for $300,000 each. In 2000 he owned the Brunswick
market site and claimed to make $500,000 a year in rent money.

His business portfolio was as wide as it was impressive with interests
in shops, cafes, fashions, fragrances, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs
and land in regional Victoria. He and his companies owned two white
vans, two Commodores, a red Audi, a 2000 silver Mercedes, a Nissan
Skyline and a red Ferrari Roadster that he bought in September 1999.
He even managed to give his wife a Kilmore pub as part of the family
businesses. One of his fashion houses was appropriately named LSD
apparently an abbreviation for Love of Style and Design. It was
apparently the drug dealer's idea of a private joke.

BUT IT WAS NOT THROUGH DRUG DEALING or shady business dealings that
Mokbel first started to develop a questionable public profile but
through one of his other great passions  gambling. In later years,
with nearly $20 million of his assets frozen he took to describing
himself as a professional punter  even though he was banned from
racetracks and casinos as an undesirable.

For years Mokbel was known as the type of punter who used inside
information to keep the odds on his side. He was the leader of the
notorious tracksuit gang  a group responsible for a series of highly
suspicious late cash plunges on racetracks in Melbourne, Sydney and
Brisbane.

His team once won $500,000 and demanded to be paid in green $100 bills
after lodging the bets with the older grey notes in what was a clear
money laundering exercise.

Some bookies refused to lay credit bets for Mokbel because he was
often forgetful on collection day. One claimed he lost more than $1
million from the non-payer.

In 1998, racing officials launched an investigation into the ownership
of nine horses linked to Tony and Carmel Mokbel. The following year
the Victoria Racing Club banned them from racing horses.

But racing experts say Mokbel continued to own horses although they
were officially under the names of friends and associates. He used the
same strategy in "legitimate" business, hiding his interests under the
names of friends and family.

During the 2001 police investigation into Mokbel, police found the
prolific drug dealer had strong links to seven jockeys and trainers.
Phone taps picked up his regular conversations with three leading
jockeys, but racing authorities were powerless to act, as the phone
taps could not be released for a non-criminal investigation.

Mokbel was finally arrested in 2001 on drugs charges. In 2004  while
on $1 million bail and despite having his assets frozen  he told
friends that he had won nearly $400,000 on the Melbourne Cup. He was
also seen punting heavily at the Oaks two days later, backing three
winners in a row, including the appropriately named Hollow Bullet.

The public display so angered senior police they moved with racing
clubs to ban him from the Melbourne casino and Victorian racetracks.
Several years earlier, in late 2000, Mokbel had begun an affair with
Danielle Maguire. She was not the only woman in his life, but he was
living with her when he disappeared on March 20 this year  days before
his cocaine trial was due to finish. Maguire  who has been unable to
help police in their inquiries as to his whereabouts  is the
ex-girlfriend of Mark Moran, a drug-dealing standover man who was
murdered on June 15, 2000. When Mokbel was arrested in 2001 he and
Maguire were living in a Port Melbourne bayside penthouse that he
rented for $1250 a week. He told friends he enjoyed the relaxed
seaside lifestyle and planned to buy the property.

SO HOW DID TONY MOKBEL GRADUATE from dishwasher to unknown amphetamine
dealer and then to the Hollywood crime cliche of the millionaire,
Ferrari-driving drug baron with the beautiful girlfriend and the
celebrity lifestyle?

It began modestly and in the early days he was more bumbling crook
than master criminal. In 1992 Mokbel was convicted of attempting to
pervert the course of justice after a clumsy bid two years earlier to
bribe a County Court judge was undone in a police sting. He was trying
to shop for a "bent judge" who would give an associate a suspended
sentence for drug trafficking.

Mokbel and two others were arrested as he handed over $2000 as the
first of $53,000 that was supposed to have gone to the judge. Part of
the "agreed" payment was to be made in cocaine.

In 1998 he was convicted over amphetamine manufacturing but beat the
charge on appeal. His lawyers successfully argued he should not have
been charged with amphetamine trafficking when the drug he was
handling was pseudo-ephedrine  a drug that could be used to make
amphetamines.

Inmates in prison remember Mokbel as "cunning and a fast learner". His
main lesson was the need to insulate himself from hands-on drug
dealing and only use middlemen he could trust.

According to police he was one of the first of the major drug dealers
to move into the designer pill industry, pressing tablets for the
nightclub crowd.

According to the UN, Australia has the highest use of ecstasy per
capita in the world and the second for amphetamines. Mokbel could
cater for both markets, manufacturing speed in Australia and importing
ecstasy from Europe. And for his top-shelf clients he smuggled cocaine
via Mexico.

He had pill presses hidden in Coburg and Brooklyn and the consummate
networker developed his own team that included an industrial chemist,
rogue police, a locksmith, dock-workers, jockeys, trainers, a pill
press repairer, distributors and cargo bonds officials. He had used
two brothers as local speed lab cooks but also sourced drugs from Sydney.

His profits jumped from large to massive. Convinced he was born lucky,
Mokbel started to spend $20,000 a week on Tattslotto. It was more than
a Saturday night interest. First division wins and big plunges on the
track helped launder drug money into punter's dividends. (Some of his
laundering efforts were less successful. It was rumoured he left
millions hidden in a large washing machine but that the cash
mysteriously disappeared after an unwelcome late-night visit.)

No drug trafficker, no matter how powerful, can work alone and Mokbel
was to develop an extensive underworld network, although his contact
list has somewhat shrunk due to Melbourne's gangland war. Among his
associates have been Nik Radev (killed in April 2003), Willie Thompson
(July 2003), Michael Marshall (October 2003), Andrew Veniamin (March
2004), Lewis Moran (March 2004), and Mario Condello (February 2006).

As Mokbel's wealth and profile grew so did the interests of drug squad
detectives. Two police investigations into him failed but a third, set
up in 2000 called Operation Kayak began to track the activities of the
massive drug dealer.

It would be a trusted insider who worked as a police informer who
would destroy him. The informer, who has since fled the country,
eventually became an ethical standards department source and helped
expose corruption within the drug squad.

Only after the informer took them inside the secret world of Tony
Mokbel were police able to establish the unprecedented size of the
empire. First there was his fake, or pseudo-ecstasy, business. Using
locally produced amphetamines mixed with other available drugs he
pressed millions of tablets. He told his friends he made them for $3 a
pill and sold them for $12 to $14.

He also imported hundreds of thousands of MDMA ecstasy from Europe
paying $4 and selling for $17 in minimum 1000 lots. Still not
satisfied at quadrupling his money he would sometimes crush the pills
and re-press them at half strength to double his profits.

In late 2000 he told the informer he was part of a team importing
500,000 ecstasy tablets although he said his normal shipments were
about 75,000 tablets. The load arrived in a container ship and cleared
Melbourne docks just before Christmas.

He had also planned a 3-million-pill importation worth more than $50
million in March or April 2001. It is not known if it landed. But
always keen to explore new drug markets he bought 80,000 LSD tablets
for $5 a tablet, later being told by a colleague he was ripped off.

In August 2001 Mokbel was finally arrested over importing barrels of
the chemical ephedrine to make an estimated 40 million amphetamine
based pseudo ecstasy tablets. Police estimated the 550 kilograms of
the chemical turned into pills would have had a street value of $2
billion.

The charges didn't stick, but it was the beginning of the end for
Mokbel. His business assets were frozen after his arrest and were
managed by the National Australia Bank, which had loaned him millions
for his property developments. But without regular cash injections
from his drug operations the loans could not be serviced and his
empire collapsed.

Mokbel was also charged by federal police over importing three
kilograms of cocaine from Mexico, an enterprise that Mokbel dismissed
as "just rent money". Rent money or not it was a compelling case. Even
his lawyers advised him to plead guilty for a reduced sentence.

But the punter was keen to back the long shot. Mokbel knew that many
major drug cases had been delayed because some drug squad detectives
had been charged with corruption. He pleaded not guilty and in 2002
was bailed after 12 months in jail. He was to report twice daily at a
local police station but at one stage had the conditions altered so
that he could take his children to Gold Coast theme parks. He
naturally stayed at his own idea of an adventure playground, Jupiter's
Casino.

During the long court delays, Mokbel informally approached detectives
offering a deal. He would plead guilty and guarantee two other drug
dealers would also plead if they received only two years each. Then,
he explained, all those nasty corruption allegations would disappear.
It would be business as usual.

But there were no deals and one of the traffickers was sentenced to
five years and the second to 11.

During the trial Mokbel remained relaxed  even to the point of
appearing cocky  a puzzling performance considering his defence veered
from ludicrous to laughable.

But with the trial close to complete Mokbel looked a beaten man. It
was either that he knew his dream run was over or that he had learned
even more disturbing news. Tony Mokbel, the hands-off drug dealer, was
under investigation for murder by the Purana gangland taskforce.
Mokbel was told that he was being investigated by the Purana gangland
taskforce over at least one  and possibly more  underworld murders,
including that of Mario Condello, who was shot dead at his Brighton
East home on February 6.

The puppet-master who pulled the strings was no longer looking at a
long, but manageable jail term for drug trafficking. If charged and
convicted of a gangland murder he was facing life with no minimum.

The man who always reported for bail at the South Melbourne police
station just disappeared on March 20. He left his three mobile phones,
his girlfriend, his frozen assets, his city apartment and his public
image profile and walked away.

Without a client, his legal team, led by Con Heliotis, withdrew but as
all evidence had been led Justice Gillard allowed the case to
continue. He was found guilty of drug trafficking on Tuesday and
yesterday sentenced in absentia.

"I think he has had an exit strategy in place for some time," one
policeman who has worked on him for years says. "Tony never liked to
back losers."
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MAP posted-by: Derek