Melbourne's last crime tsar faces end of the road

Cocaine. Photo / Thinkstock

Tony Mokbel, the last of the crime tsars whose wars left Melbourne stained in blood, has finally fallen and now faces at least two decades in jail.

Lebanese-born Mokbel, 45, this week pleaded guilty to a series of drug charges relating to an illicit business claimed to have earned A$180 million ($227 million) in two years, in a deal that saw a raft of other allegations withdrawn.

He is already serving nine years for importing 3kg of cocaine from Mexico, shipped back to Australia in statuettes under the covert surveillance of American and Australian police and customs agents.

Police had previously dropped one charge of murdering hotdog seller and underworld figure Michael Marshall in 2003, and he was acquitted of another of hiring hitmen to kill Lewis Moran, patriarch of one of Melbourne's leading crime families.

A jury found that prosecutors had failed to prove that Mokbel had ordered the hit with Moran rival Carl Williams, later murdered in a top-security jail.

Yesterday appeals by the two men who executed Moran at the Brunswick Club in March 2004, Evangelos Goussis and Noel William Faure, were rejected by the Victorian Court of Appeals.

The two men, who are both serving life sentences, claimed they had been paid A$140,000 by Mokbel and Williams.

Mokbel, for a time Australia's most wanted fugitive, has reached the end of the line. Mitigation pleas will be heard on June 16, and he will be sentenced at a later hearing. Mokbel, full name Antonios Sajih Mokbel, began working life as a dishwasher, moved into restaurants and branched out with dozens of other companies involved in, among others, cafes, hotels and property development.

He lived much of his millionaire life in an incongruous mansion in the inner-city suburb of Coburg, owning luxury cars and becoming well-known as a high-stakes gambler - until he was finally banned from racetracks and casinos.

Behind the public good life, Mokbel was deeply involved in the Melbourne underworld and became one of Victoria's biggest producers of designer drugs, escaping the law while associates fell to police raids.

But his decision to import cocaine from Mexico was his downfall.

US authorities were alerted to the shipment, and police were waiting when it arrived in Australia.

Mokbel was arrested and charged, but during his trial - still on bail despite police objections - he walked out of court in March 2006 and vanished, sparking an international manhunt that ended only after an unknown associate turned him in for the A$1 million reward.

His escape, the full details of which have only recently emerged, first took him to a farmhouse near the old gold mining town of Bonnie Doon, about 115km northeast of Melbourne, then, after a brief stay on another isolated property near Castlemaine, to a secret rendezvous with a yacht off the West Australian coast.

He sailed to Greece via the Maldives, living in an Athens apartment with his pregnant partner Danielle McGuire under the alias of Stephen Papas, a Sydney businessman interested in property development.

Mokbel was arrested in 2008 dining at an upmarket cafe, and flown home on a private jet chartered by the Victorian police.

Because of his notoriety and defence claims that he could never receive a fair trial, much of his history and charges earlier laid against him were suppressed ahead of his trial on trafficking and other charges.

Mokbel struck a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to large-scale methamphetamine trafficking, dealing in MDMA, ecstasy's key ingredient, and to inciting an undercover police officer to import a commercial quantity of MDMA.

The guilty plea will avoid other, lengthy, trials and Australian media commentators believe Mokbel may serve about 20 years in prison.