We're talking here of a callous and self centered man, probably a form of sociopath. As most crooks are. They're in their sixties, they're not overly well or overly fit. They live mostly on rich food and beer, and they're unarmed. So they are very tempting targets. And guess what happens to tempting targets. He turned to Bertie Rout and he said, I'm off here. That's criminal slang for I'm going to be killed. I'm Andrew Rule his life and crimes.
We've talked about the.
Sudden death of Andrew benji Veneman, who ran into several thirty eight caliber bullets in a back room of a Carlton restaurant while having a private chat with mcgatto, And as everyone knows, that was twenty years ago plus a couple of weeks. It's sort of the anniversary period now, And as everyone knows, mcgadow was charged with Andrew Vanneman's murder, but subsequently was acquitted with a defense of self defense, which is always the best defense, although it doesn't always work,
as we're about to find out. Eight days after benji Venomen was shot dead, there was a tit for tat revenge shooting. It happened in the Brunswick Club hotel in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and it was on the thirty first of March two thousand and four, which makes it exactly midweek and eight days after Venomon's death. Now that evening, let's say five point thirty six o'clock, there was a gathering of interesting people in another place in Sydney Road.
This was at the bellefora restaurant in Sydney Road. Right up was a Brunswick Police station. And at that gattering of people there were at least three people of interest to us. One was Tony Mockbell, another was his brother, Milad Mockbell, and a third was a highly skilled speed cooker or am fhetamine's production cook who worked for the
Mockbell family business producing and fetamines. We can't name that fellow, but I have seen a document that he signed for the police later on, and in that statement he says that early in that evening, while sitting in that restaurant opposite the Brunswick Police station, Millard Mockbell leaned over and said to him and I quote, that I should go straight home that night because lewis Moran was going to be killed unquote. Now soon afterwards, while our man, the speed Cook and the Mockbell.
Brothers are still at this rett.
Suddenly they look out the window and they see a huge number of police cars speeding out of the police garage and turning south and heading down the Sydney Road towards, as it turns out, the Brunswick Club Hotel. So the balloon had gone up in the prophecy had come true. Now, unless the Mockbell brothers are psychic or worse psychic, they must have had inside knowledge of this hit. And I'm
tipping that's what happened. They knew because they'd been told, and they will have been told by the man who undoubtedly ordered the hit, the late Carl Williams. It's striking that Andrew Venomon had been buried just the day before, So the biggest news story of that day and of that week was the burial of Andrew Venemon. There've been a big funeral.
Out at a Greek Orthodox church.
In where Sunshine, the same church where Benji Venerman, as a nice little clean cut kid, had once been an older boy, which could be a story in itself, but now interestingly, the day after his funeral, the Empire strikes back. Carl Williams has organized the tit.
For tat hit on.
Really the last surviving member in a sense, of his enemies, the Morans. Now it's not strictly true to say that, because Lewis Moran's brother, Des Morane or Tappan's Marane, was still around, but he wasn't really a big member of that crew. From where Carl Williams was sitting, which is
in a position where he really hated the Mornes. He hated the Mornes because five years earlier, in nineteen ninety nine, on his twenty ninth birthday, he had been shot in the belly in his rather large with a very small pistol, and that had wounded his belly a little bit and wounded his pride a lot. And that, of course, as everyone listening knows, was the starting point of this underworld war. It was really a vendetta waged by Carl Williams using lots of drug money to pay hit men to shoot
at his enemies. And his key enemies were the Moran brothers, Jason and Mark, by this stage already dead one killed in the year two thousand one, killed in the year two thousand and three, and now their father Lewis, and so this was really a sort of a royal flush of Moran's and clearly organized paid for by Carl Williams and or his associates. It's possible that Tony Mackbell was mixed up in it as well, because obviously he knew about it, so he must have been fairly close to the organization.
Now let's talk about Barol Lewis.
Lewis at this stage was sixty two years old, fair age for a crook who has led a tough life, done a lot of drinking and smoking, and had a lot of fights and all that sort of stuff. It seemed to some people at this point that he'd sort of lost interest in life, that he didn't have the sort of competitive edge that he used to have. We're talking here of a callous and self centered man, probably a form of sociopath, as most crooks are.
But he was a fellow that had lost.
His own natural born son, Jason. He'd lost Jason's half brother Mark, who was his basically foster son or adopted son, and he clearly would have been knocked about by those events, and he would have been deeply aware that his name was on a list somewhere and that he was in danger. He had been warned by the police that, you know, he shouldn't do routine things and make himself an easy target, and he had stopped drinking at the Laurel Hotel in nasket Vale, much to the relief of the people who
owned the Laurel. I should point out those people had been so keen to get rid of him as a regular drinker for some time that they took note of his favorite habit of drinking beer from what they call ponies pony glasses. Older people will recall generally it's a reference to five ounce glasses, which are half the size of a pot of beer, so they're very small. Some people claimed that six ounce glasses or ponies, but I
don't believe that. And the ponies were used by a lot of those old timers who spent a lot of time in pubs, a lot of crooks like them, because it meant the beer was always cold. You weren't holding a great big thing of beer and making it warm. It meant that they could drink a lot of them
without getting maggoted drunk. They could have you know, a dozen ponies, and in the end it wasn't that much beer compared with drinking seven pots, so they would ultimately drink less, I think, and it was colder, and that was just their habit. That's what they like to do. A bit of an old fashioned thing among those older crims. Nowadays, of course they just take drugs. But anyway, so Lewis Moran had finally decided that he would leave the Laurel
hotel and go elsewhere. Before he went, he was the subject of a bit of plotting by the owners of the Laurel. They said, oh, those ponies, those small glasses that you like, Lewis. It's a pity, but they've all been broken in the dishwasher and we can't get any more, and that's a bit sad, So maybe you'll have to go to a pub where they've got some. Next day, a huge carton of brand new pony sized glasses arrived at the pub, a gift from Lewis, who had found
the glass manufacturer who could supply them. So the Publican no longer had an excuse to stop him drinking at his pub, but where he couldn't get Lewis to move. The police persuaded Lewis that he was in danger if he kept going to the same local pub every night, and so he moved camps. He went over to very tricky this. He moved at least one postcode. He went across to the Brunswick Club in Sydney Road. And obviously, if he was smart, he wouldn't go there every night.
If he was smart, he would have gone to other places and broken up his pattern. And perhaps he wouldn't have gone at exactly the same time and left it exactly the same time and not got home at the same time, because that makes.
You a very easy target. But he's the problem.
Even though he was a crook who often made a lot of money, or had at different times made a lot of money, he was enormously mean and stingy. And he got into the habit of drinking at the Brunswick Club hotel because it was a pokey pub and it had quite cheap beer.
The beer there was cheap.
He had a membership card which would get him in there, and he didn't want to go anywhere else where the beer was dearer, and so he and he's old on again,
off again mate. Bertie Rout, who was an old, reprobatant rat bag and not nearly as tough or mean or bad as Lewis Moran, but he was a crook himself in a minor way, and he hung around with all those guys, and he was a contemporary of theirs, and they were all mixed up with Carlton Football Club, which is one of the reasons all that crew were called the Carlton Crew because some of them lived in Carlton, but all of them were heavily associated with watching the
Carlton football team. In fact, Bertie Rout's father, Jack Rout, had been a very significant figure at the Carlton Football Club. I think he'd been one of the early presidents something like that. So they were connected up in that sense. So we've established that Lewis and his old mate drinking mate, Bertie Route.
They go to.
The Brunswick Club at a round five point thirty most nights and they stay there for like three hours and drink fever to beer and then they leave and go home and cooked dinner. Lewis was quite an accomplished home cook. He used to watch cooking shows. They were his favorite things. And that's what they would do now they saw it.
I think as a bit of a.
Point of honor that you know, where old style hard men, crooks blah blah blah. We're not going to be pushed out of our routine, We're not going to be told what to do, We're not going to dodge around, et cetera. And so they pigheadedly kept going to this Brunswick club. At this point, both of these guys were on bail, which meant they couldn't really be carrying guns or weapons
because that would break their bail conditions. And if they were picked up, which I easily could buy, and checked by the police, it would mean they'd go straight back inside on romand because they had certain charges that they were facing. And there they were there in their sixties. They're not overly well or overly fit. They live mostly on rich food and beer, and they're unarmed, so they are very tempting targets. And guess what happens to tempting
targets the week after benji Veneman is killed. Lewis really does have a bullseye on him, and so it was that at about six forty pm on that day, thirty first of March two thousand and four, according to Bertie Rout. This is what happened, he says, and I'm not sure if the police have established if this is true. Bertie Rout always claimed for years afterwards that Lewis Moran took
a phone call which rattled him. He took a phone call which left him frightened or in fright and he turned the phone off, and Bertie said he looked terrified. And seconds later they hear footsteps running into the bar. Now it's got a hard wooden floor, and when somebody actually runs hard, it would echo, and it would obviously
be something violent about to happen. And as soon as they heard these footsteps running towards them, Lewis who must have got some warning on the phone, either a literal threat, we'll get you now you're dead, or perhaps a call from someone he knew, which he correctly intuited, was someone checking where he was so that that person could give
the okay to the hit team. Because in the underworld there are plenty of people who will play the role of Judas, and one of the ways to set up a hit in the underworld is that the hit people organized for someone known to the target to help them tip off where the target is, and it's a funny thing. In the underworld. There's nearly always someone who will sell themselves out for whatever reason, either for money or for a favor, or because the other people have threatened them,
whatever it might be. There's no doubt I think that Lewis did have a short warning that he was about to be attacked. He turned to Bertie about and he said, I'm off here. That's criminal slang for I'm going.
To be killed.
If you're off, someone says I'm going to put him off, that means I'm going to kill him. It's shorthand. And as soon as he said that, he started to run across the gaming room from the bar into the gaming room and he yelled out to the woman who was managing the gaming room, a lady called Sandra Sugars, and said, out of the way, Sandra words that effect.
But it was too late.
One of the gunmen who had run in, there were two of them. They were masked, you know, balaclavis or masks, and they had guns plural. One of them had pursued Lewis Moran and he went to shoot him at close range with a shotgun. I'd presume a sawn off shotgun and no, and behold, the shotgun jammed would didn't work, which makes you think it was probably a sawn Off automatic shotgun because the other ones don't jam much. The single or double shot guns very rarely jam. And that
didn't work. So that hitman pulled out a heavy caliber pistol I'd think a revolver and shot Lewis Moran twice in the head at point blank range, which killed him instantly. He was dead before he hit the floor. Sandra Sugars, the woman who was right there watching this. She said the last thing she saw was his hands up trying to protect his face, and a terrible scene for her
to see. Meanwhile, while that shooter, Shooter one, is shooting Lewis Moran, the main target the second shooter, Shooter two, and there's some debate about who's who and the zoo and who those shooters were, which is one of the points of today's episode. Shooter two shoots for old Bertie rout. Now Bertie Routes only sin is to be a drinking companion of Lewis Moran. But anyway, while they're cleaning up the Carlton crew, they thought they might get him too.
The shooter said something like I've got you now, old man, and shot him with a I think a heavy caliber pistol, but it basically rendered his right hand inoperably. It was almost shot off high in the arm, and that was not so good for Bert. Bert claims, we can't be sure of this unless someone's got the security footage. But Bert said he took a bit of a kick at this bug. He thought he might try and kick him and kick the gun out of his hand or something
good thinking. But it apparently missed because the fellow shot him again. And in fact, I think the shooter might have emptied his pistol in the general direction of Bert route. Not every bullet hit him, but plenty did, and he was very badly hurt and was enormously lucky to survive, and he did survive. He survived for another eleven years. He lived until the year two thousand and fifteen, which was eleven years later, and died in his early seventies.
So he lived to tell the tale, and the tail he told was that his tough mate Lewis had turntail and run and that he tried to kick his shooter but didn't get there, which made him look a bit good, and it really became.
The greatest story of Bert Route's.
Fairly undistinguished life is how he survived the hit men, and his memories of that day were something he talked about quite a lot to myself and several other reporters. So who done it well? Clearly Carl Williams, with a bit of help, possibly financially from Tony Mockbell, had organized this and paid for it. There's I think phone records, phone taps showing that Carl Williams said something to one
of these fellows. There's one hundred and fifty thousand reasons to smile, referring to a payment of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the hit. In fact, I think a total of one hundred and forty thousand was delivered. Somehow, for some reason, they clipped tenth off the price, made little mistake their own way.
As some of these fellows do.
The shooters were not immediately picked up, but the police would have a fair idea of who was in the running to be doing such a thing. There's only a handful of people around who would be up for it. I think one giveaway for them was that the security footage of the Buntu Club might have shown that just behind a glove on one guy's hand or something like that, they saw a bit of a tattoo which identified or tended to identify one of the shooters as a fellow
called Noel for A or Nol four. And Noel four was one of a big family of habitual criminals and career criminals, third generation criminal in fact, four, like the Marines, were crime royalty in Melbourne. Fathers and grandfathers. You know, they'd all known each other. I think some of the known each other working on the docks and abatwars all
that sort of stuff. So on both sides of this hit the shooters and the shot came from families that would have known each other for fifty years or longer more. And it just shows you how destructive these underworld wars can get when drug money is introduced and sends everybody crazy and creates these big vendettas. And soon the police had a bit of a head start on this and they were drawing conclusions about who might have been involved. Thirty nine days after this, that's just six weeks and
a bit after this, there's another shooting in Melbourne. And this happens on the night of May the eighth, which is, as I said, thirty nine days after the previous shooting of Lewis Moran. And again I think the police had a fair idea who might have been responsible, because within days really they raided the SOG, the Special Operations Group there, the swat team guys. They ambushed three men near a shopping center and they arrested a man whose name we cannot reveal here and probably cannot name.
Until he dies at least.
But let's say, an old career crook.
That's who that guy is.
A career crook, been a crook all his life, vicious, evil, scheming, very bad man. We will call him the old Crook, or variations on that theme. The other two, well, one of them was a young fellow called ange Goosis an ange Gooss, it's a Greek name. Ange Gooss had been a really promising boxer, middleweight boxer back in the eighties. He was supposed to go to the Seoul Olympics in nineteen eighty eight, as I think a light middleweight to
box for Australia country. He didn't go. He sort of started to hang around with the bad guys, he'd been trained by a very fine boxer called Paul Ferrari, who was well known around Melbourne because he was one of the great heroes of the TV Ringside era. He was a small, fast boxer that could box very very well and he could teach other people how to box well.
And Paul Ferrari and ange Gooss's brother, who was a really good guy, Ane's brother, they were very upset and distraught at how ange Gooss, who was a pretty nice young bloke of extremely good boxer, great reflexes, relaxed, knew what he was doing and knew how to do it, and also could take a punch. It didn't get upset when somebody else hit him. So he had a lot of the attributes of a champion fighter. But the other bit of him that didn't suit was he was easily led.
He was too low to friends that he shouldn't have had friends that were the wrong sort of friends, and good boxes, particularly if they've got a little bit of size about them, attract the wrong people and the wrong people in these terms of some of the sort of guys who go to the fights and they duchess the boxes and they want to sort of keep them as pets, and they use them as quote marks, drivers or bodyguards that sort of stuff, because those gangsters like to have
someone around who can use their fists to drive them around. It means it's a sort of a safer way to be defended than having guns in the car or whatever if you don't want to get arrested. And so Ange Goose's had become one of these guys. He would hang around with tough guys and bad guys and drug dealers and all the rest of it. And he became a bouncer in a dandy nightclub, which is code for dealing with drugs and all the rest of it. And so Ange had fallen into bad company and one of his
previous bosses had been shot dead. That was Nick Radev, the Bulgarian drug dealer. And after that he fell in with his old crook. And the old crook he's a good con man. He was a bad guy, but he knew how to engage with this younger boxer, and the young boxer really took to him, really trusted him. And the reward he got for that, listeners, was that the older guy just used him up. And when they're arrested.
The older guy the bad old guy.
He manipulated Ange Gooss and he said, look, Goose, I can't afford to take the rap for the shooting because I've got so much form, etc. But you are virtual clean skin, which Ange really wasn't. He did have some form, but he said, you'll bet it on self defense.
Now.
Funnily enough, just weeks earlier, Mick Gaddowood shot venemone and he did subsequently bet it on self defense. And the dirty old crook assured Ange Gooses that this would be okay, that if he took the blame that they would he'd bet on a self defensing Well, guess what. It didn't wash. It didn't work, It didn't stack up, the forensics didn't
stack up. Nothing stacked up. The dirty old crook started to do deals with the police, and he betrayed the young fellow Goose by persuading him to take responsibility for the murder Goose and Goose's the young boxer was given a big sentence for his alleged part in the murder, even though detectives and lawyers knew that he hadn't done it and didn't believe his confession, didn't believe the statement he signed and several of them advised him not to do it, said, don't do it, don't do it, don't
sign up for this, you know it's too risky. But he insisted, through some twisted sense of honor and doing the right thing and not being a dog and all that stuff, insisted on taking the wrap for the thing, hoping he would beat it with a play of self defense. And he didn't, and he went down for the murder and did a lot of time for that and subsequently, and it took a long time for the police to
pull all these together. Goose and the aforesaid Noll four were charged over the Lewis Morane case, but it wasn't until two and eight, four years after the Marne shooting, that those two lead shooters were actually convicted and went down for that null for an older guy. He was given a long sentence with twenty three minimum, and he actually died in jail in twenty seventeen, a death that was reported widely in our newspaper and others. Ange Gooss, while he's already in jail, he goes down on the
Lewis Morane murder. And it's hard to know about the Lewis Morane one. He is now claiming that he was somehow stitched up on the Miran one as well Lewis Moran. And it is of course conceivable that that is true, that he was somehow stitched up on the Miran one as well Lewis Moran, and it is of course conceivable that the old reptile somehow sucked him into that and made him take the.
Fall for that. The upshot of all.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is that twenty years after Lewis Moran's murder, everyone involved is either dead or in jail, except for the dirty old crook, the manipulative, lying reptile who organized other people to take the fall for him. It would appear, and we can't be certain of this, but it would seem likely that that man is now as a result of giving extensive information to the authorities about the underworld and shootings and all sorts of stuff,
that he's probably been let out. He's young offsider, relatively innocent, young fellow, and he's doing thirty five years, which is a monster. It's a massive, massive sentence. Carl Williams went to jail and he's dead. The man who paid for the murder, Noel four, as we mentioned earlier, died in jail, and of course Tony Mockbell, who was charged but cleared over the Brunswick Club murder of Lewis Moran. He's in prison for serious drug crimes as we all know. And so end of the day, they're all in.
Jail or dead, except for the man who arguably deserves jail and death the most the law can be.
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 podcast's soul And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.