Alen Moradian died alone and fast in a black Audi when the gunmen waiting in the garage of his Bondi Junction hideout fired.
His killers didn’t wait for the 48-year-old crime lord, known as Sydney’s Tony Soprano, to arrive at his gym on the Tuesday morning last month they put seven bullets into him. Of the 20 gunned down in Sydney’s bloody crime gang wars within the past two years, plenty have met their end in a shabby suburban gym car park – the assassins’ killing ground.
Moradian, who had been hiding out in the rented apartment for eight months after police warned him that criminal rivals wanted him dead, was a big wheel in Australia’s cocaine pipeline. In 2011, after Moradian admitted his Golden Gun drug syndicate was behind the importation of 300kg of cocaine into Sydney, a judge gave him 16 years. He was released in December 2017 and back with his wife in their northwestern Sydney mansion where, police claimed in court, they dined off golden Versace cutlery, beneath a painted ceiling inspired by Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel.
In emails police tendered during those court proceedings, Moradian’s wife, Natasha Youkhana, pleaded with her husband to abandon his ostentation and instead adopt the low-key suburban New Jersey lifestyle of the television mafia boss, Soprano.
“Why do you just sit there and show off, do you see Tony Soprano doing that?” she wrote, adding with worthy prescience: “You, on the other hand, want the attention, you get a big head, you love it. People like that won’t survive.”
Aside from the ritual torching of stolen getaway cars – three, including a Porsche Macan, were dumped and set alight in Sydney’s east minutes after Moradian was executed – the aftermath of each shooting brings an epic funeral that’s more an outpouring of Gucci than grief. After Moradian’s wife was pictured hugging a mourner wearing $1790 Louis Vuitton Run Away sneakers, one of a dozen security guards barrelled up to the Daily Mail’s photographer, telling him: “Don’t you know who these people are? They will break your f...ing face.”
As the bodies continue to pile up while homicide and organised-crime detectives chase leads in unsolved murders, some of which date back years, New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb has become testier. It worsened after two female associates of gangland figures were executed while en route to an engagement party in Sydney’s south-west.
“This is not a CSI one-hour programme,” she archly told reporters enquiring about her progress in reducing the carnage.
Others with cameo roles in the ongoing drama include the growly boss of the police homicide squad, Danny Doherty, a man with a face from Dublin and voice from Dubbo.
“He obviously had a big target on his back,” Doherty deadpanned at a news conference, recounting the seven bullets that hit Moradian.
Another is the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s veteran crime reporter, Mark Morri, who is enjoying late-career fame garnered by his scoops as the gangland wars go on. Like his gangster subjects, Morri is on TikTok discussing his job and the way social media and the myriad of CCTV cameras around Sydney have brought instant vision of the gang wars.
He says, “In the old days, literally, guys would just go missing in gangland or they were shot in the back of their head at midnight and buried in a shallow grave. Now it’s all been done out in public.”
In Sydney, there’s a feeling the reality show can run on – as long as the cast feast on their own.
