This is Life and Crimes. I'm Andrew Ruhle. Today we've got a question and answer because some of our listeners have done us the favor of sending in some questions. I will attempt to answer them, but if I can't, I won't. Of course, the questions will be put to me by producer John Burton, who is not just a pretty face.
First question, Andrew, and thanks to everyone who sent in questions comes from Jay and Jay asks. The Pentanil clan are an interesting study. I've found out through my reading recently that they were known to inform on one another as they were often in competition within the drug trade. Can you tell listeners any particular or interesting stories of the family that may not have been covered in the media.
Big question. They certainly would inform on each other if it suited them, because they were vicious, they were selfish, They were drug dealers. They were most of them drug users, depending what drug they fancied. I suspect that all of them would have used cocaine and many of them would have used emphetamines. I'm not sure about the heroine angle. I think they probably reserved that for giving hot shots to the poor girls who worked in their brothels and
massage parlos. But they were vicious, selfish, nasty, brutish people. Many of them were not full brothers and sisters to each other. Most of them had different fathers from each other, which is partly reflected by the numbers of names. There was Dennis, Bruce Allen and Peter Allen. Then there was the Petan Gills, and then there was a couple of other names sprinkled through it. And they were a bit of a licorice all sorts in that regard, but far more poisonous.
Speaking of Melbourne crime families, Charlie asks during the Melbourne Gang War, Jason Moran and his family spent time in the UK. How did Jason Iran can get a visa to get to the UK.
The question I'd like to ask is why didn't Jason Moran see fit to stay in the UK. To answer your question, he may not have had any very serious convictions at that point of his life. Jason Moran spent a fair bit of time he and his relatives in not being convicted. They had very good legal representation. His father, who raised him and also his biological father, was the
late Lewis Moran, who was extremely well connected. Lewis Moran had a series of expert criminal lawyers in his corner, culminating in our friend of our program, the late Andrew Fraser. It's one year since Andrew Fraser died this week. Actually, and Andrew Fraser was a highly skilled and aggressive, combative criminal lawyer, and he looked after the Morne's interests very well. And I think you'll on if we go back that Jason, he would have had a lot of form, but he
didn't have much form on the record. He hadn't been convicted of much, so clearly not enough to stop him going to the UK. He might have had more trouble going to the United States. That's the place that's pretty touchy about convictions. What I want to know, as I said before, is why didn't he stay there? All I had to do was keep him away for longer and
let things cool off. But no, Jason had to come home to the center of the universe as Scott Vail, and within a matter of no time, the bad guys who wanted him dead made sure he was dead.
And this is interesting because the episode that we just had go to weir about the surfer who grew up in a world of crime. Larry Blair, Larry Blair and his stepfather coming back to a life of crime having got out and gone into the inland.
Absolutely the same thing. Baldy Blair couldn't stay away. If he'd lived in a cave or an underground house in kuuber Pety for a year, two years, I don't know, six months, even things might have changed. The bad guys might have moved on, you know, wanted to go to jail and want to get shot or whatever. But oh no, he's got to go back to Sydney and he's got to go back to the same pub where all his
mates drink, because that's the center of the universe. He couldn't see himself even you know, moving from kuober pet to Darwin or kuober Peti to Perth doing something like that. No, he had to go back to Kujie, to the same pub where all those bad guys, his alleged mates who weren't really his mates, were drinking. And he just was a risk taker and that was the risk he took and he ended up getting his toes cut off or his belly burnt with a blowtorch and then been.
Killed and now a question from Steve. There was particular period when being a fruiterer in Melbourne became very dangerous. Can you expound a little on why this potentially was?
Well, migration mostly post war, but some of it back in the twenties meant that a lot of people came to Australia from the Mediterranean countries, but particularly from southern Italy, obviously Greeks as well and some Lebanese in one smaller group, and a lot of those people, regardless of what they did back in their home countries, took on small businesses that they could work hard and make a living, and being fruit among us was one of the things that
they were at. They were good at growing stuff. Small farmers are peasant farmers, many of them from Collabria and Sicily and so on, and therefore being good at growing stuff, they then got involved in selling stuff and some of them moved on to buying the shops that sold the produce,
and they pretty well infiltrated the Victoria marketers. It was wholesale market in those old days post war, in the late forties early fifties, there was a lot of Italian people at the markets and that's when we got the market murders, which were a very big deal in the
early sixties. And I can remember a relative of my wife who'd fought as a rat to brook in the Australian forces at Toabrook in the Middle East, and he said that one of their old army mats was having problems with the Italians at the Victoria Market, and all the old aif Ex soldiers, who were probably in their forties by this stage, they went to the vic market and they tipped over all the Italian trestle tables full of fruit and vegetables and said, there'll be no more
trouble will there And it wasn't. But what those guys did was basically prey on other Italians, the people that they could scare, and they knew that the rule of omitas complete silence, never speak to the authorities, would protect them because they could stand over fellow Italians, and those fellow Italians would never ever spill the beans to the authorities. And so there is the birth of the local version,
the Australian version of the Italian mafia. That's how they grew up through the fruit markets, and then of course they expanded what's better than fruit and vegetables cannabis, which, of course when they grew it at Griffith and Shepperdon and at Mildura it was known locally as calibrazy corn. The Collabrians just to grow it, and that got them into drug money, and that got them into drug smuggling, drug trafficking, and so it grew.
And now a question from Pat Pat asks, do you think any person will ever be convicted of the cath Bergmann and perhaps what the cas Bergman case in a might be.
I remember that case well that talking about Italian mafia figures, one of the Victorian Italian mafia businesses was the Chop Chop tobacco up in the northeast now the northeast of Victoria, back in the bad old days was chocolate block with tobacco farms. In fact, Justice Michael Croucher, the judge who was in the Wongata case, he came from a tobacco farm up at Mertalford. Now Italian farmer's been good at
growing stuff, started to grow tobacco. They would buy these farms in the fifties and sixties and seventies, and naturally they would get involved in growing some tobacco on the side and selling it as chop chop without attracting excise tax, and that would become an arm of organized crime selling
chop chop. Now those families became well established and interlocking with each other, they, like all the other sort of Italian mafia families, would never give evidence against each other, they wouldn't cooperate with the police, etc. One would imagine that some families in the Northeast, in say the King Valley and those other valleys up there, would not only
grow vines, wine grapes, but would grow tobacco. And it would appear that Kath Bergmann had married into one of these interesting families, one of these diverse and vibrant families. And they were so diverse and vibrant that Kath, who was a beautiful young girl I remember doing the story. She was gorgeous girl of nineteen or so, and she
got pregnant to them like from down the road. And she got married, and she had a couple of kids, and eventually I think became a very unhappy wife on the farm up in the King Valley or whichever valley it was, And one day she split up with her husband and moved into a nearby town it was I think Wangarata one of those towns, and she vanished one day.
She vanished. Now it seems clear that she was abducted from her home unit in whatever address it was in wang or whichever town it was up there and never seen again. And it is widely thought that someone close to her, perhaps related or you know, an intimate partner or former intimate partner or whatever, would be able to throw some light on that, if only they could see their way clear to help, but so far they haven't. Varlet Cath She's not coming back is a very sad case.
A bit of a change of pace. Now a question from John Doe, and John asks, if that is his real name, how many police corruption stories do you hear about or have to sit on because there's just not really much evidence involved, and police corruption is one of those areas that is probably more touchy than others in crime reporting.
Yeah, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I do think that in Australia, Victoria Police, relative to other police forces, I've got a pretty good record. That doesn't mean they've got a good record, but relative to Sydney, relative to Brisbane, relative to Perth, I think the Victoria police better than
the others historically. In this sense. It has been said by wiser people than me that in Sydney you couldn't get to the top of the tree unless you were corrupt, and probably true in Brisbane where we had so Terrence Lewis, you'll recall in Melbourne you would not get past being say a senior sergeant or maybe an inspector if you
were corrupt. It was contained at a particular level. That doesn't mean there was no corruption, and it doesn't mean it wasn't pervasive, but it didn't go to the Chief Commissioner's office and it didn't go to the Premier's office in Victoria. In New South Wales it certainly did. To answer you a question more specifically, clearly, there's always been some element of some corruption at various levels of the
police force. Obviously, you know, if you're in a place like St Kilda or Footscray in the past, out in the West Paran around there where there's nightlife, where there's restaurants, pubs, clubs, drugs, drugs assale, those are the areas where they draw. People come there from other suburbs and from the country to
those places. They flock there. They spend money there on often illegal pursuits, drugs and brothels, that sort of stuff a prostitution and it attracts the clients of the prostitutes and the drug dealers, and it attracts prostitutes and drug dealers. So you've got this whole goat's head soup of potential corruption. And it was said to me earlier today by someone quoting a Some Kilda police sergeant who'd worked there a
long time. He said, nothing happened crime wise in St Kilda, nothing happened crime wise without the knowledge or the active participation of certain police. That doesn't mean all the police, but certain police were in on the giggle. Now that wasn't always about money. It didn't mean that was always about cash and brown paper bags. They would have some pet crooks doing things because the pet crooks give them information about other crooks, and so their tame crooks would
dub in other guys that were more dangerous. Let's say, so police would cultivate crook A in order to lock up crooked B, C and D. This is a pretty untidy looking arrangement, and of course it is a bit untidy because it would soon be tempting for police to clip the ticket on the way past. If we're going to pay informers with the slush fund they had to pay informers, surely they would take a bit of that fromselves because they're working over time whatever. It becomes very messy.
You've got police dealing with large amounts of cash, and so when they put the arm on a crook who's got a whatd of cash that would choke a race horse, the crook is going to say, listen, you keep half of that and give me the other half and let me go. And sometimes the police are going to do that because what's the odds, you know, we're only going to pick him up next week. Anyway, they even had a word for it. We used to find them. We'd
find them, we'd take their money. Now a lot of those guys just didn't regard that as particularly criminal, because they'd still catch crooks and lock them up. But they'd find a few along the way and take their cash and use it as play money. Sometimes they use it for holidays, for a bit of a slush fund for interstate trips. I reckon a lot of them, probably, you know. I used to dress very well and punt on horses.
I can remember police that used to race a horse or two, probably able to pay for training fees in cash. You'd think we won't go down that line.
Lastly, and I should say, we've had a lot of questions and several people suggesting topics for shows which we may look at in the future. But lastly, if I can be slightly indulgent and ask a question myself, and that is one that is ripped from the headlines. Yes, and this headline is that a couple of days ago, or probably a few days ago. By the time this episode comes out, a local Victorian bloke has come forth with a theory or two about.
The I don't tell me mister Krule, the.
Identity of mister Krule, and his thesis, if I may is he suggests that mister Craule never existed in the chilling series of abductions, rapes and murders across Melbourne with the work of multiple offenders in the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties. Now, we've talked about mister Crule a fair bit on this show, a lot of it. What's your thought about this theory?
Now, this is the this is the truck driver from Grovedale, I think, And there's nothing wrong with Gravedale, and there's nothing wrong with truck drivers. Without them, where would we get our goods from John? But whether he's a good arm jess sleuth, I don't know, but I have to say that he's one of many people. And I'm talking thousands of armchair sluths across the world, not just in Victoria, not just Grovedale, not just Bendigo, not just Mildura, but
of right across the anglosphere. And I have been besieged with really interesting and ornate, complex theories about mister Krule from people in Ohio and California and all sorts of places. And the interesting thing about all of them is this, if you are keen enough on a particular theory, you will always find circumstantial evidence to support it, and you gently push to one side circumstantial evidence that doesn't support it. And so none of these theories are necessarily crackpot theories.
But that doesn't mean they're right. They can't all be right, because if you've got one hundred armchair sluths such as our mate from Grovedale, if you've got a hundred of those guys, You've probably got a about eighty eight different theories. Now they can't all be right, you know, because one guy thinks you did it and one guy thinks I
did it. The guy in America that got in touch with me sent me massive amount of information which was very interesting that he gleaned on the Internet, which is frightening, you know, this open source that you can find anything. And he built a theory which wasn't crazy, but didn't have sort of fantasies in it didn't have little green men, no magic. It was all sort of facts, carefully chosen
facts to sity theory. And he postulated that a really well known Melbourne journalist one I know, well, this is a man who's been very well known in Melbourne journalism for fifty years. This person, this arms in America, postulated that this Melbourne journalist was mister cruel and that he'd obtained gun a pistol from his own father. And this guy had all this evidence to that effect, and he'd
followed this journalist's life from suburb to suburb. And even when this journalist went to Japan, you know, the crimes dropped off here and in Japan there was a similar crime in you know, blah blah, whichever prefecture, and it was wonderful, and of course it was nonsense. So draw your own conclusions. There are a lot of people with a lot of theories, and they can't all be right, and I suspect that none of them are.
It's just funny that the sort of the bigger the web is the more ways that you can navigate, choose your own adventure.
Choose your own adventure that is perfect, and they do. And look, it might be that they're all a little bit right. I believe that probably come and chan that there's a fair chance she was not a mister cruel victim. The evidence against it seems to me to be nearly as strong as the evidence for it. Police are divided on this, as we've said on this podcast many times, please are divided over it. So what would we know.
So anybody out there that thinks that there's a common check offender and another offender or offenders, they may well be right. It's a matter of who it is that's the tricky bit.
Thank you very much to everyone that has written in to us. If you would like to ask a question, you can email us at Life and Crimes at News dot com dot Au. Life and Crimes at News dot com dot you, which we will link in the description of this episode, and ask Andrew a question hopefully we might read it.
We will and John, thanks for asking those questions. They're always diverting. Thank you, Andrew, thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun product action for True crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts Sold at news dot com dot Au.
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