Fugitives in foreign lands

is Life and Crimes Today. My colleague and I Mark Butler, are looking at an interesting thing. We think it's interesting anyway. It's the issue of bad people, or allegedly bad people, who do things, or allegedly do things, and then scarper

they leave the country. They get on a big jet plane these days, usually a jetplane, and they fly to somewhere where they can hide out, often to a place without an extradition treaty or with an extradition treaty that is so slow, so full of red tape that they know they can sort of dodge things, and often places where the sufficient corruption, especially down at a low level, that they can duck and dive and dodge the law

for years, if not forever. And of course some destinations are better than others, and some are better than others because some of these people are dual citizens and they are able to go back to the country of their birth or where their parents are from, countries where they speak the language, and where they have some rights, and often in some places those rights include the right not to be extradited back to Australia to face inconvenient charges

of murder or drug trafficking or rape. Serious things like that, the sort of crimes that used to get you hanged in the good old what people used to call capital crimes. So there's many of them. Sometimes the authorities swing and miss. That happened back in the eighties with the Keystone Cops pursuit of Robert Ozzy Bob Trimbli, who was on the loose for six years after he was tipped off to

get the hell out of Sydney. He was tipped off by a bent cop in nineteen eighty one who said, now, Bob, if you want to give me some money, I can tell you what to do. And Bob gave him some money and he said, all you've got to do when you exit the airport, is you just change your date of burst slightly by one day if you like, on the exit documents, and nobody's going to pick that up. You will go through, your pass will go through, and

you will get out without being stopped. And that's all it took back in that era for you to be able to walk through customs. Which was very interesting because Bob left town having been tipped off that he was going to be arrested on major charges which I think were not only big drug charges but murder conspiracy charges. And he left town with his ever eleven girlfriend, am

Marie Presley, and I think her daughter. They went to various places, but they ended up in Ireland, which was where they were, and he was living under an Irish name there. Some years later when the wicked Australian media found out that he was there and sent reporters over there, and one reporter fellow called Stephen Price. Steve Price is

well known to many of our listeners. I can recall him filing a story from Ireland which had the introduction and the headline, I slept in Robert Trimbowley's bed, and that was either a high watermark or a low water mark of journalism, I'm not sure which. The point was that the journalists, the reporters were a little bit ahead of the police, and trim Bowley and his girlfriend amed Marie and the girl were able to stay one step ahead of the Australian police, who were, let's say trying hard.

The Federal police, I think we're genuinely trying to catch him, but they just weren't very good at it. And Trimboli and his little entourage ended up leaving Ireland and going to Spain. And you would think that finding them once you had the trail will be a bit like tracking an elephant through snow, But no, the Feds couldn't catch him, and in the end, Robert Trimboli died of what he had was terminal cancer at this stage. He died of cancer in his own bed in Spain in nineteen eighty seven,

surrounded I think by some of his loved ones. They'd actually managed to go there and be with him at that time, which the police hadn't managed to do, and this prompted interesting coverage. One of the reporters on the job in those days was this company, this newspaper's wonderful foreign correspondent Bruce Wilson, and Bruce Wilson was terrific. He's no longer with us, but he was a great reporter.

And he wrote a story which said, if Robert Trimboli is the most wanted man in the world, then the second most wanted man can sleep very soundly indeed, and I think that story had to be taken down and sort of had to climb off at a bit because the federal police got very upset, and a particular officer, I think got a bit upset about it, but he did make a fair point that they really hadn't done a great job to catch Robert Trimboly. Trimboly is of many that have got away and stayed away, and a

few have been brought back. Another one, of course, in recent times, is our old mate, a modern Trimboli. Really is our old friend Tony Mockbell, who some twenty odd years later did a similar thing. He knew that he had a lot of money, He was very well versed in the ways of police, investigators and prosecutors and others, and he got the tip off, probably from a lawyer, that they were looking for him, or they were going to charge him with something, and he vanished. He vanished,

as we all recall, where's he gone? He didn't turn up to court whatever, and he was gone, and no one knew. And there were all these wonderful theories and wonderful rumors about where he gone or where he hadn't gone. The reality was he'd actually gone up to Bonnie Dune, where there is a lot of serenity, and he stayed at Bonnie Dun in a little cabin where he was visited by his girlfriend, Dannielle Maguire, who's an interesting person, and they spent some months i think, up there on

and off. And then Tony Mockbell arranged for his associates, who were very good at these things, to buy an ocean going yacht, which they bought over on the east coast of Australia, and they had it toad or taken by truck all the way to the West coast, right across another board, and then they took it to Fromantle

and Bell and his family or somebody's family. He made sure he had a car load of people, and he had a guy driving and a lady in the front seat, and he was in the back seat pretending to be a mute, metally deficient middle aged man. It was a very good disguise, so he could just sit in the back seat and not talk or say anything. And they drove across the another board and they went to Fremantle, and there he had these Greek sailors on his boat.

And the Greek sailors and a carpenter modified the boat so they could hide a man his size under a certain table or whatever it was without the custom sky's finding it. Then they thought they might go to somewhere

a bit quieter, so they sailed the boat. The Greek crew that manned the boat, they sailed it up to the north, up to Kartha or something like that, the top and the Kimberley, and meanwhile Tony and his mates drove up and then he gets on the boat at one of those northern ports where there's very sleepy sort of customs, and he was able to get shut into

the little locker that he'd built. They sailed out into the Indian Ocean, and after forty eight hours or something he could get out of his little claustrophobic locker and they sail right across the world to the Suez canal where it would be a bit tricky for you if you were not legit. But of course somehow he had enough money to buy his way through, and he got the grease. And that's where old Mockbell was hiding in Athens, not in plain sight, but sort of. He I think

could speak Greek pretty well. He's of Lebanese extraction, but I think he knew plenty of Greek and was comfortable there. His great and good friend, who was pregnant, Danniel Maguire, was to join him. Now, the police back here, we're very keen on following her or having her followed overseas, because they thought, well, if you let her go, that she'll lead her to the man. And they had into Pole, and they had Italian police and made all sorts of

interesting people following her when she went to Rome. And there she's in Rome, and lo and behold she's with another woman, with a female actor and Australian actress. And they were meeting together in plain sight at a good hotel in Rome, I think it was, and they were being watched, which they probably realized was the case. And

Daniellie's wearing let's say, a red distinctive red coat. She goes into the bathroom and comes back, and then the friend goes into the bathroom, comes back, And what they actually did was change coats, so that when one comes back wearing the coat, the watchers who were sitting two hundred meters away think it's Dannielle, but it's not. It's

the actress. Meanwhile, the real Danielle has gone out the back door of the hotel and skipped town, and she's got across the border into the rest of Europe and she's ended up happily with Tony for quite a while. And so that is what has happened with the strange case of Tony Mockbell. Long story short, it's quite possible that Tony Mockbell would not have been caught except for

one thing. One of his former associates, or an associate of his group back here in Australia, a man that we will call the musician, because I think he was a musician. He was close associated with these guys and he was sort of trusted by them up to a point, but he had a grievance. His grievance was that one of his own family members had I think either if he hadn't died of a heroin overdose, was at least

effectively a junkie. And this guy ended up not happy with the Mockbell drug empire, but he was trusted by them. And what he did. He had access to a laptop. He was talking to one of the Mockbell Lift tenants who was trusted with sending money to various dark accounts around the world that Mockbell could access. And he had phone numbers and stuff and it was all on one laptop.

And when this Mockbell liftenant, when this Mockbell heavy left the room to go to the bathroom, the musician grabbed a thumb drive, jammed into the computer and downloaded all the material in it, including bank numbers, phone numbers on all this stuff, puts it in his pocket. When the guy comes back ninety seconds later, they just kept talking and chatting about the soccer or whatever. He goes out

and he gives the police this information. It was that that led the Melbourne police to Tony Mockbell in Greece because straight away they said, well, he's the phone numbers, this is the numbers using we can trace it to Athens, etc. And we all know how that ended up. Tony's over there wearing his very bad wig and he gets grabbed by the Athens police who are working on behalf of

the Australian Police. It was a great piece of detection, but all of it comes down to this insider tipping the police off, and it would appear that had that not happened, they may not have caught him. And the point of saying that is that so many people that have gone overseas have not been grabbed. They've stayed around for years. It's easy to sort of crack jokes about the Danniel mcguires and mock bells, but there's nothing funny about what happens in most of these runaway criminal cases.

One of the worst of a long list unfolded almost a year ago when a woman who's also a mother of a young child vanished from her Point Cook home, the one she shared with her husband, man she'd been married to for twelve years now. This woman had migrated, as her husband had, from India when they were young adults, and I'm not sure if they got married here or over there, but they come out as young adults and

I think they'd both become Australian citizens. The name that she used mostly was Sweather Sweather Mattagani, and no one knew that she had actually vanished on I think on a Friday early in March last year, twenty twenty four. The first that the police or anyone knew that she'd vanished was that they got a call on Saturday morning, March the ninth from India where they got a very

brief tip off to look for her. So police got the tip off from India, they found and to swear the Madigani's body in the bin around noon on a Saturday in a wheelie bin down pasture along It turns out that her husband, surprise surprise, his name is Ashok raj Avari Kapala. He apparently had dumped it there before flying to India the previous afternoon. Now it would appear that there's no other solution to this because it was him that tipped off the police from India. It would appear.

It seems that a taxi driver told the police a few weeks later that the twitchy husband and a bewildered little boy had gone to Melbourne Airport from Point Cook by taxi in time on the Friday afternoon for an afternoon flight to India. Now, the husband's in laws, that is, the dead woman's parents, were woken up at four am local time over there on that Saturday morning in the city of Hydrobad and they heard the terrible news from

their son in law about their daughter's death. They heard it directly from the only person in the world that knew about it, which was their son in law, because he told them that their daughter had sadly died while he was trying to silence her while I having an argument. Now, this would suggest I imagine that he's either smothered her or strangled her. But regardless, he told them the story that she was dead, and he confirmed that by tipping off the police in Melbourne, who then went and found

the body. So it all ties together. That man then left his in laws and vanished. He left the small boy three year old boy with them with the grandparents that the child probably hardly knew but anyway, and he disappeared into the vast, sprawling city of Hyderabad or another city nearby called Shannai, I think and various I think this also. Bangalore, southern India has something like two hundred and fifty million people and many big cities and many

small cities and many, many, many towns. It's a very thickly populated place. It is the center of the Indian IT industry. And this man, the husband in this case, ashok Raj Vari Kapala, was a bit of an IT expert and he was also bilingual. So our bad husband is an IT expert. He worked in IT in Australia. He was obviously pretty good at it. They had the good house in Point Cook, they had the Mercedes Been station wagon, they had the Mini Cooper car. They were

living the good life. So he's clearly a highly employable sort of guy. And all he would have to do in India probably is to manipulate his identity documents a bit so that he was reasonably hard to track, but

he could probably still pick up work over there. The reality would appear to be and the police do not confirm or deny anything about extradition, and fair enough, the police aren't in a position where they can talk about who they get an extra diit or how or when, and that's good, but it would appear that at best it is a process that is long and slow and

a big problem full of red tape. You've got the red tape in Australia, then you've got the world famous red tape in India, a country that runs on red tape apparently and has a very choked public service bureaucracy, and everything is slow, and quite possibly things are only

marginally efficient if the right amount of bribes are paid. Maybe, And it would seem that it will be a long slow process to get that hussman back to Australia to face what would be I think murder charges or manslaughter charges if ever, that is, if he ever is brought back at all. The smart money says that he may

never be because we have other cases. We had the notorious case of pan Panit Panit was the young Indian born guy that ran over someone here in South Bank, just across the river from the CBD in Melbourne, killed that person. Tragic case. Now some years ago he was actually charged with that. I think he pleaded guilty and

he got bail, but he jumped bail. In two thousand and nine, Panite used a friend's passport to get through the airport and go to India, which beggars belief that as recently as two thousand and nine the passports were sufficiently primitive that that could happen, But apparently that was the case. Having got to India, Panite has gone into smoke and has never been hauled back to Australia to serve out a significant sentence for culpable driving or whatever

the charge is. And there's various reasons for that. One might be that he might get tipped off by local authorities or something, if there's a move to get h I don't know. He might have just been able to assume a slightly different name in a country where there

are millions of people. And as one of my colleagues pointed out to me, India is a place where thousands of people a year are killed or severely injured on the roads with traffic, cars, motorbikes, bikes, the whole catastrophe, and it is not regarded over there as a particularly serious thing, particularly serious offense. They accept it as a fact of life that if you're out on the roads you may well be run over and killed. And so there is not that commitment to finding someone like him

that there would be here in Australia. So we have cultural differences working against the Australian authorities. Indian security sources have told me that it's possible for a resourceful fugitive in India to get out of India one of two obvious ways. They said, you could get a fishing butt or a boat over to Sri Lanka and then work your way around. You'd have to get false documents which are gettable over there, or you could go to Nepal

by road. You could walk into Nepal. Probably again, you could get false documents made up, even a passport made up, that would be sufficient to get you out of India into certain Southeast Asian countries. You wouldn't be able to fly back to Australia or to Western countries because their border controls are more sophisticated. But I was told by this Indian security that there are some countries in Southeast Asia where an Indian passenger on a plane would be

able to get through fairly easily with forged documents. That's another possibility for what could happen to some of our most wanted people. Now, we do have one example of Australian police working very hard to get back some runaways who committed a very bad crime in Melbourne. Now this was the murder by three Thai Nationals of a nassy guy called Luke Mitchell. Luke Mitchell, it was a notorious case. He was a good samaritan. He was a chef. He's

twenty nine years old. He was out I think with his sister in law and other friends in Brunswick one night around nine, between nine and ten o'clock at night or something, and they saw a disturbance in the street in Sydney Road and was outside a massage parlor and these three Thai guys had been aggressively harassing a woman.

Now I suspect it was all something to do with the massage parlor, and maybe these were standover guys or something, but the reality was that they were hassling this woman and that a bystander thought that was very unpleasant and had stepped in to try and protect the woman. And then these three have turned on the bystander and roughed

him up. Luke Mitchell, good block, good samaritan, sees this happen and he goes over to step in to prevent these three guys from monstering the bystander, and he gets in a fight with these guys and he's throwing punches and I think probably acquitted himself pretty well, and then he and his sister in law and friends walked up the road not far to a seven eleven to buy

some cigarettes or whatever, coffee whatever. Meanwhile, the three tai guys have gone off and got hold of knives and a meat cleaver, which tells you something that probably they were going around equipped to stand over people, and they have come hunting for Luke Mitchell. They've come back armed and they've attacked him. Three men have attacked Luke Mitchell with these weapons and they've stabbed him. They've knocked him over. They've kicked him as well as stabbing him, and he

died of his wounds. He died in front of I think fourteen witnesses. It was a terrible crime for a good samaritan who was just trying to help someone else. The police were fairly quickly, fairly quickly able to identify who these guys were from security cameras and stuff. But by the time they did that, these guys had gone straight to the airport and jumped on a plane back to Bangkok. On the way, it stopped in Hong Kong,

proof that the police were fairly onto. It was that the police found out they couldn't get them arrested in Hong Kong, but they could get them photographed, and they got photographs from the security people in Hong Kong and it showed these three guys. One of them had some blood on him or something, or some cats or bruises

or whatever, and it was clearly these three. And the police then went about the official process for looking for a needle in a haystack, and they approached the tie authorities and said, well, these three guys started up, they would have had their names. We want them back here for this murder. And eventually, I think after three years of doing and frowing and official stuff and red tape,

they identified them and got them back. Now, it took ultimately six years and three months, six years and three months from the murder until those three guys went to jail in Melbourne. Two of them got very big sentences I think twenty four years on the top. The third guy got well under twenty years because he gave evidence against the other two. That was a good result, good

gogged detective work by the Victorian police. I think it was Ron Iddle's back in that day that was handling that and he and his team did a very good job. Sometimes the hunt is doomed from the start. Years ago, homicide investigators identified Chinese students as suspects in a murder at box Hill, but these students were gone by the time they confirmed who they were. This is very intriguing. These Chinese students. You wouldn't sort of think of them

as going around murdering other people. You would wonder whether perhaps they were operatives of the Chinese government. You would suspect that would or not. And by the time the police worked out who they were, or you know, who they allegedly were, they were gone back. And as one policeman said, once that happened, you can kiss it goodbye. You'll just never find them. And that's what happened. They were never found, never seen again, and the murder remained unsolved.

Probably even more disturbing in some ways because it's more public and therefore more dangerous to most of us walking around, was the escape of the shooters who sprayed Sam. The punisher Abdul Rahim. So this is back in twenty twenty two. This is the case where he's gone to his cousin's

funeral at Faulkner Cemetery. He's driving out in a very slow convoy behind the hearse or whatever, and up comes a stolen the masdra I think it was SUV, and they spray his Mercedes Wagon, his g wagon with a massive amount of lead fired from a machine pistol, I think, And it broke the windows of his car and it sprayed him across his chain. I'll never forget that news photo of his chest later published, where his chest had been stitched with three or four bullets and it hadn't

killed him. It was an amazing thing. Those lunatics then drove off. They actually hit a fire hydrant nearby outside of service station. One of the lunatics there around a young guys has run over and dived into a skip full of cardboard boxes, hidden under the cardboard boxes for all of about five seconds, and then come out of

the skip deciding it wasn't a good idea. While he was doing this, the jumper that he artfully put over his head so no one could see who he was came off his face, so the security footage that was at the service station showed his face, so that wasn't great. Meanwhile, his mates run away doing much the same sort of thing. Now,

this gang that couldn't shoot straight. They did manage to get in a car and go straight to the airport, and then they got straight on a plane to Dubai, and then they got straight off that plane and they vanished. They disappeared. Presumably they've been looked after over there by some Middle Eastern crime paymaster, the same one who may well have been paying them to shoot Sam abdul Rahim.

Sam abdul Rahim, who of course just recently has been shot dead at long last after several attempts on his life. The reality is that although the police were able to arrest some other peripheral people here in Melbourne who were somehow associated with the bad guys, the two shooters got on a plane, got to Dubai and have vanished. And the betting is that they will never come back and will never be brought back. That is just my tip.

Who would know The police and the Feds and everybody else might be working on getting them out as we speak. It's hard to know. Then there is the good looking dude, common cheero, heavy, former male model. His name is Hassan to Paal. Now he hasn't been seen in Melbourne or in Australia since twenty nineteen because he took a sudden flight overseas for the good of his health. He left behind here a string of shooting victims, most of them

the wrong victims and very interested police. Now to Pahl has been having a good time in the country of his four bears in Turkey while arresting arrest or an ambush back here. I think he's managing to do business from over there remotely as these guys do. He's a good looking rooster, and he's a gangster, and he's a commonchero and he's a tough guy. But he's also the suspect in two, not one, two wrong victims homicides dating back to twenty seventeen. He's not going at the assassination

kaper he gets the wrong people. The target in one incident was the late Mohammad Afghan Ali Keshtiar, who was marked to die down at Nari Warren at a house where he lived. Then the shooter, whoever it was, watched the assignment and shot an innocent visitor, a bloke called Zabi Estja. This was a lucky break for the intended victim, Afghan Aali, but it wasn't a permanent stay of execution because of course, Afghan Ali Keshtiar was shot dead in

Southierra some time later. Our friend Hasanto Pal meanwhile was also involved allegedly in shooting at several bandidos as they rode their motorbikes I think across the Balti Bridge and didn't manage to bowl any of them over, but created a lot of problem there, a lot of fear and angst and friction, and ultimately he decided he should leave Australia while the going was good, and I suspect that he will probably stay in Turkey or some other countries

over there for a long long time. Any case in which the suspects have not even been charged or interviewed makes extradition even more difficult than in the Panate case. It's really hard to do and the police do the best they can with what they've got, but it's not easy. But as they say, time is on their side. Time

wounds all heels. One Middle Eastern organized crime figure and former Australian businessman who fled Australia to escape the police heat returned a decade later without any struggle of all because he was in a coffin. So a man left Australia to get away from the police and after a decade he came home in a coffin and he received an extraordinarily lavish funeral because in fact he was a very big drug trafficker and they always have big funerals.

Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production 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. That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.