Jason Moran was all things to all people. Doting
father, loyal friend, loving son and grandson, generous mate, dangerous enemy,
drug dealer, gunman, vicious street brawler, standover man, violent drunk and
most likely murderer. And he was connected. Moran glided through the stratas of
Melbourne society like a grey nurse shark cruising a reef looking for easy prey.
When he needed the type of character witnesses
who might impress a County Court judge during his most recent court case, he was
able to produce Father Joe Giacobbe, the head of the Doxa Youth Foundation and
colourful Catholic priest; Tom Hazel, former secretary to the Victorian Governor
and business consultant to millionaire businessman Rino Grollo; football star
Wayne Carey; and former Essendon councillor Keith Goodwin. He mixed as easily
with sports stars, horse-racing identities, lawyers and businessmen as he did
with armed robbers and drug dealers.
Last week, more than 250 death notices were
placed for 35-year-old "Jase" Moran, gunned down in front of his
six-year-old twins and three other children last weekend in an underworld hit,
although how many were genuine outpourings of grief and how many were insurance
policies to deflect suspicion and keep the still-powerful Moran family on-side,
no one knows.
Tomorrow afternoon, about 1000 people are
expected to file into St Mary's Star of the Sea church in West Melbourne –
ironically the same venue for the final farewell of underworld figure Alphonse
Gangitano, whom Moran was identified in an inquest as having killed in 1998 –
for Moran's funeral. Not bad for a likely lad from Ascot Vale who left school to
work in the slaughter yards and, even as a teenager, who liked to impress
friends by showing them the pistol he carried.
The Moran clan was no ordinary family. On one
side, it traced its roots back to a violent underworld dominated by the
painters-and-dockers wars of the 1960s and '70s and, on the other, it was
connected deep into Melbourne's Australian rules football culture and the
Carlton Football Club.
It gave the Moran half-brothers – older brother
Mark was gunned down in an underworld hit three years ago at the age of 36 – a
childhood where heroes were an odd mix of Carlton premiership players and
gun-totting underworld heavies.
While the Moran boys once dreamed of playing
football at AFL level and acquitted themselves well enough in suburban leagues,
it was the lure of that second set of shadowy heroes, including the notorious
Kane brothers, that eventually won out and took them to their violent ends.
Mark Moran's father was Leslie "Johnny"
Cole, a painter and docker with extensive criminal links who earned his
reputation as a hardman in Melbourne before moving to Sydney to act as an
enforcer for local crime boss Frederick Charles Anderson. Cole was shot dead
outside his luxury home at Kyle Bay in November 1982, an early casualty of an
underworld war that also claimed the life of Melbourne hitman Christopher Dale
Flannery.
Jason Moran's father is Lewis Moran and his uncle
Tuppence Moran. Both are well respected within Melbourne underworld circles and
have links to the painters and dockers networks of their generation. Lewis
Moran, who has been described in court as an alleged crime boss, is in jail on
remand accused of taking part in drug deals worth $10 million over four years.
Jason and Mark's mother, Judith, was the daughter
of Carlton Football Club general assistant and doorman Leo Brooks, with whom
many interstate and country recruits boarded during the 1970-80s, including
members of the 1981 premiership team.
The Moran brothers got to know Carlton players
well and, at times, were baby-sat by them while visiting their grandfather's
house in Carlton. The Carlton Football Club theme song was played at Mark
Moran's funeral.
At home, the Moran family's friends were a little
more varied and colourful. Among them were the Kane brothers – painters and
dockers Brian, Les and Ray – who rose to prominence during a bloody underworld
feud in the 1970s with gang boss Raymond Bennett, the mastermind behind
Melbourne's Great Bookie Robbery in April 1976.
Les Kane was machine-gunned in his Wantirna home
in front of his wife in October, 1978, and his body dumped and never recovered.
His wife later identified Bennett as one of the killers, although he was
acquitted of the murder. A year later, Bennett was gunned down at Melbourne's
City Court by a lone gunman, most likely Brian Kane.
Les Kane's daughter by his first wife, Pat, is
Trish Moran, Jason Moran's widow.
After Brian Kane was shot to death at the Quarry
Hotel in Brunswick in November 1982, a newspaper death notice from 14-year-old
Jason Moran was addressed to "Uncle Brian" and signed "Your
Little Mate".
Both Mark and Jason went to Ascot West primary
school and later Essendon Grammar, a private school where aspiring parents from
the western suburbs with sufficient money sent their sons in the hope they would
break out of the cycle and find better lives. If that was the intention, the
strategy failed badly.
Mark Moran was the more popular at school. He was
brighter, better at football and had more friends. Jason, as is often the case
with younger brothers, was forced to live within Mark's shadow. He always
appeared to try too hard at everything, including impressing friends, and was
intense – many say too intense. He also had a quick temper and was aggressive.
He was also easily led.
Those who watched him grow up frequently use the
term immature to describe him. On one occasion, as a teenager, he tried to
impress a girl by flashing her the gun he was carrying under his jacket.
On the football field, he tried hard, eventually
playing both under age and later open age for Kensington, but, unlike his
brother, was plagued by injury and kept breaking down. Jason left school and
went straight to work at the City Abattoirs near the Newmarket saleyards, where
he stayed for three years until they closed in 1987. In the abattoirs, the work
was hard, as were the men who did it, and the drinking was even harder. These
were men under whose influence Jason fell and he rapidly developed a taste for
both the hard drinking and the good money – and flashy lifestyle – the work
brought.
After the slaughterhouse closed, he tried
plumbing for six months before spending two years as a sales assistant in a duty
free shop in central Melbourne. From there, he moved on to the jewellery
business, working for seven years for a Melbourne wholesaler.
The jobs changed, but the hard living didn't and
a court would be later told that Moran's alcohol consumption increased "to
his own detriment". A regular watering hole was the Laurel Hotel in Ascot
Vale, also a favourite hangout for footballers and western suburbs underworld
heavies.
Around the Ascot Vale and Flemington area, the
Morans ran with a crew of youngsters who would, like the brothers, eventually
find notoriety on the six o'clock news. Victor Peirce, a member of the
Pettingill crime family, Graham Jensen, Jedd Houghton, Gary Abdallah, Mark
Militano, Santo Mercuri and Frank Valastro would all graduate to armed robbery
and some would later be linked to the Walsh Street police murders in 1988.
Jensen, Houghton, Militano, Valastro and Abdallah all died from police bullets.
Peirce, acquitted of the Walsh Street killings, was gunned down in an underworld
hit outside a Port Melbourne supermarket last year. There have been suggestions
and rumours that the Morans may have been involved in armed robberies, but
nothing has ever been proved.
The 1980s was the end of an era, as armed robbery
as a traditional criminal career path was overtaken by the more lucrative and
easier drugs trade, particularly the rapidly growing market for
"party" drugs such as amphetamines and cocaine. The Morans apparently
made the transition easily. Jason's first court appearance was in 1986 for
possessing marijuana and, by 1989, he was in court for possessing amphetamines.
He counted among his friends convicted drug dealer John William Higgs. And Mark
was returning from a drug deal when he was ambushed and killed outside his
Aberfeldie home. It was later revealed that, just weeks before his murder, he
had "warehoused" about $500,000 worth of drugs at a friend's house.
Mark Moran believed in keeping a low profile, but
Jason began running with a new group, the Carlton Crew led by Alphonse Gangitano,
who, despite having no family connections with Melbourne's true Italian crime
networks, liked to play the role of flashy Mafia don.
The Carlton Crew made their money from protection
rackets on nightclubs and restaurants, drugs and extortion as Gangitano became
something of a media celebrity, in his expensive imported suits and sunglasses.
Moran rose to become Gangitano's right-hand man and, in December 1995, the two
of them, along with a friend of Moran, visited the Sports Bar nightclub in King
Street demanding $20,000. A fight broke out during which patrons were viciously
attacked with billiard cues and chairs. Moran was quickly arrested. Unknown to
him, he was being targeted by police in an undercover operation and bugs placed
in his home recorded him openly boasting about the Sports Bar assault. Moran
would eventually be sentenced in March 2000 to 30 months' jail, with a minimum
of 20 months, for the assault. Gangitano would never make it to trial. He was
murdered in his Templestowe home in January 1998, sometime after he reportedly
fell out with Moran. A later inquest was told that Moran most likely killed
Gangitano.
Moran knew before going to jail in 2000 that he
was a marked man. While on bail awaiting trial for the Sports Bar attack he was
savagely beaten and said his lawyer at the time, came "within inches of
losing his life". When released from jail on parole in 2001 he asked to be
allowed to go overseas because he feared for his life. He also put his $700,000
Moonee Ponds unit up for sale, began taking precautions in case he was being
followed and reportedly always carried a gun.
Time ran out for Moran last weekend when leaving
an Auskick session with his twins, Christian and Memphis, three other children
and mate and low-level criminal Pasquale Barbaro. Moran was keen to pass on his
family's passion for AFL to his son and his regular attendance at Auskick at the
Cross Keys Reserve, North Essendon, was the one time he lowered his guard. A
masked gunman used a shotgun and revolver – the combination used to kill Mark
Moran – to shoot dead Moran and Barbaro in the front seat of their Mitsubishi
van.
Those close to Moran, claimed he was a changed
man in the time leading up to his death, mainly because of the birth of his twin
son and daughter. He had married his longtime partner Trish on Hamilton Island
on Christmas Eve 1999 and, at his sentencing hearing in 2000, Wayne Carey was
one of the character witnesses who claimed Moran had turned over a new leaf.
Carey told how he lived near Moran and the two visited each other's homes and
shared mutual friends, including former Kangaroos player Anthony Rock.
"Look, I think he has matured a hell of a lot," Carey told the court
in February 2000. "I know first hand, you know, what alcohol can do to you
sometimes. I have been in trouble five years ago myself for being out and
drinking too much."
Moran also claimed to have started earning an
honest living. His sentencing hearing was told he was casually employed on the
docks as a trainee forklift driver earning $1000 a week. But when his boss was
quizzed more closely, it was revealed Moran had worked only 97 hours in the
previous eight months.
Last week, it appeared that more people were
willing to admit they knew Jason Moran in death than in life. The names of some
of the 250 death notices read like a who's who of Melbourne's underworld:
painter and docker Charlie Wootton, who as a teenager disposed of used shotgun
shells used to kill hitman Freddie "The Frog" Harrison in 1958; Mick
Gatto, an associate of Alphonse Gangitano who has convictions for assaulting
police and possession of firearms and was named during the recent building
industry royal commission as a standover man; convicted killer Shane Cogley;
Keith Faure, who has two manslaughter convictions and was once a rival to Mark
"Chopper" Read in Pentridge; and Bert Wrout, who is facing drug
charges with Jason Moran's father, Lewis Moran.
But others were not so keen to be publicly
identified with Moran. Anthony Rock wanted to know how his name had been linked
by The Sunday Age to Moran. When told it was through Wayne Carey's
testimony, Rock, now coach of the North Ballarat Rebels, replied: "It's
nothin' to do with me, mate."
Father Joe Giacobbe, who during character
evidence in February 2000 described himself as the Moran family's "personal
chaplain", told The Sunday Age it would be inappropriate for him to
talk because of his role as a priest.
Others who knew Moran refused to comment or
failed to return calls. There are as many theories on the motive for Moran's
death and the identities of those behind it as there will be mourners at
tomorrow's funeral. Police will only say they are investigating a range of
possibilities and inquiries will be lengthy. As one death notice put it:
"God help Heaven, Jason's arrived!"
Lewis Caine found dead