Gangland Australia by James Morton

Author:James Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522857375
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2007-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

In Melbourne a different type of war was being waged. By the end of the 1980s the Melbourne police and the underworld were at each other’s throats. Two or three bank robberies were going off every week. Ray Watson, former head of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, told The Age on 26 April 2003: ‘Crime was out of control. But we took the view that it was time for the good guys to fly the flag. A number of criminals were shot during their apprehension, and slowly the culture changed.’

In the two year period from 1987 eleven suspects were shot dead by the police. They included, on 25 March 1987, Mark Militano, a member of a group of criminals from the Flemington–Ascot Vale area specialising in armed robberies. He was shot six times by members of the Armed Robbery Squad outside his Kensington flat when they went to question him. One bullet lodged in the back of his neck as he was running away. The coroner found that he had been pointing a gun over his shoulder before he was shot. One member of the team who survived, only to die in prison, was Santo Mercuri, convicted of an armed robbery on 11 July 1988 when $33 000 was stolen and a security guard, Dominik Hefti, was shot. The robbers are alleged to have included Jason and Lewis Moran and Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox. Mercuri, a fitness fanatic feared by other inmates, died following a heart attack in Barwon Prison on 22 July 2000.

In the most celebrated case, Graeme Jensen left a hardware store in Narre Warren in Melbourne’s outer east on 11 October 1988 and climbed into his Commodore. He was approached by members of the Victoria Police Armed Robbery Squad who told him not to move. Instead he accelerated. Officers opened fire and Jensen was shot in the back of the head. By the time the car crashed into a power pole Jensen was already dead. At the inquest the evidence was that the police saw Jensen pick up a weapon and they shot to protect themselves. A sawn-off bolt-action shotgun was produced which they said had been found in the car. Jensen’s friends and relations would not accept the evidence.

There is no doubt that Jensen, then aged thirty-three and described as something of a ladykiller, was an armed robber by profession. He had convictions from the age of fifteen, when he had robbed a bank and been sent to a detention centre. This had been followed by imprisonment for housebreaking and, at the age of twenty-three, three more charges of armed robbery. He had escaped from custody and robbed another bank. Released in 1987 he had, said the police, resumed his profession. It was over the Hefti killing that the police wished to question Jensen.

Around 4 a.m. on the day after Jensen’s death a newsagent, going to open his shop, saw a Holden Commodore parked in Walsh Street, South Yarra. It was empty but the lights were on, the doors open and the windows smashed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.