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Bora "Adelaide
Assassin" Altintas
Born in Turkey on
October 20, 1967, Altintas was a South
Australian drug dealer and the one time light-middleweight boxing champion of
his state.
He was also a gangster
who made regular 'business' trips to Melbourne.
In 1989, he was
sentenced to 11 years, four months' jail for heroin trafficking, armed robbery
and assault.
He served only five years
before he was released.
Altintas then turned to
professional boxing.
In December, 1996,
Altintas was shot repeatedly at close range with a shotgun as he sat in his car
in Adelaide after leaving a coffee shop.
Two masked men in a white
Holden blocked a carpark exit before shooting Altintas in his small Hyundai.
He was the target of a
well-planned hit but curled into a ball to make himself a smaller target.
The dashboard of his car
helped protect him from some of the seven blasts.
The two gunmen escaped but
have never been found.
Surgeons saved his badly
injured right arm but could not remove more than 120 pellets from his body.
After he recovered,
Altintas told his parole officer he was considering moving to Melbourne for
safety reasons but police later found he also had business motives.
In 1997, Altintas was
found to be part of a Victorian-based drug syndicate with links in four states.
He was to be snared in an
undercover police operation designed to catch the leaders of the cocaine and
heroin ring.
The Melbourne leaders of
the group gave an undercover policeman, posing as a drug courier, five small
packages containing a total of four ounces of heroin to deliver to Altintas.
The courier and the
former boxer met in the bar at the Adelaide Hilton on November 1, 1997.
Altintas said he was having
trouble raising the money and had only $7,000.
He was given one ounce
then and the other three on credit later.
Altintas was later arrested
in the final sweep.
But he had more problems.
On the the night of
August 15, 1998, two police officers were gunned down in Moorabbin.
Sergeant
Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller had been staking out several
restaurants which were seen as potential targets for a pair of armed robbers who
had been raiding many establishments in Melbourne's east.
The two policemen pulled
over a suspect vehicle and two men opened fire killing them both.
A police taskforce named
Lorimer was established to identify and capture the murderers.
In September, the phone rang at the
Lorimer office. A warden from
Port Phillip Prison said that a prisoner had some useful information on the
case. Detective Senior Constable Joe D'Alo
and a detective from the Armed Robbery Squad, Ashley Carlin-Smith, visited the
jail and spoke to Florin Dragoescu, a convicted drug dealer. "Heard
a coupla Russians were planning to do a stick-up in Noble Park a few months
back. June or July. Crazy fucks," Dragoescu told the detectives. "They
carry guns and don't care what cunt got in the road. Cops'd be a bonus, you know
what I mean. Apparently their car was packed to the gills with smack...sack of
the shit!...straight off the boat." "Had
some business in the 'burbs and some silly pig stuck his snout in. That's where
youse blokes should be looking." But
Dragoescu would not give any names or addresses and it was clear to the police
officers he was seeking a few more privileges for a few more facts., but D'Alo
opted out. Meantime, another
Lorimer crew had fished out a crim by the name of Leon
Feisch, a know
drug-dealer with possible links to the Russian mafia. Tips
from the Drug Squad and elsewhere conjured up a story similar to Dragoescu's
yarn One member, a likely
associate of Feisch, was Bora Altintas. Altintas
was reputedly in Melbourne the weekend of the murders- and left unscheduled the
next morning. Gamblers at
Crown Casino added fuel to the rumour a few weekends after the killings. A
police informer over heard talk from a South Australian party who seemed to know
the case a little too well, boozing and talking about he killings in detail. Again
the name of Altintas was mentioned. He'd
been carrying heroin, so went the talk, and a semi-automatic on his hip. Lorimer
detectives began doing their homework on Altintas. But
before Det Sgt Sol Soliman could arrange a trip to Adelaide, Altintas, who was on
bail, was repeatedly shot as
he walked down an Adelaide street on
Monday September 21, 1998. This
time he didn't survive.
Dying in the street, the man was
asked to name his killer, and refused, choosing instead to implicate another
underworld figure, George Ibrahim, as a
major trafficker in the heroin trade. Ibrahim,
and Ken Tan, dubbed the Chinaman, were linked to Bora's killing, though no
charges would ever be laid. The
motive for killing Altintas was said to be a payback for a double-cross drug
deal. But growing intelligence
suggested Altintas was not present when Silk and Miller were shot. When
Lorimer detectives finally journeyed to Adelaide, they spoke to Altintas' family
and associates.
Alibi statements, mobile call charge
records and several reliable sightings of the Russian in Adelaide on the weekend
of August 15/16 exonerated the dead man.
Yet the trip wasn't wasted entirely;
the name of George Ibrahim would resurface
on the Lorimer radar.
More
on the Silk Miller police murders
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