Alphonse Gangitano and the killing in the laundry

A little after eleven o'clock on the night of Friday 16 January 1998, Graham Kinniburgh walked out of a house in Templestowe to buy cigarettes. When he came back about half an hour later, the man he had left inside was dead on the laundry floor.

The man was Alphonse Gangitano, and he had been shot several times in the head. He was forty. Kinniburgh was one of the most respected old heads in the Melbourne underworld, a man the papers called the Munster, and he had been a criminal long enough to know what came next. He said nothing useful to anybody. Detectives later found his blood on the back flyscreen door.

There were three men in Gangitano's house that night, if the coroner was right. One of them was killed in the laundry. The other two never gave evidence about it. Within six years all three were dead, and the case has never come to court.

Alphonse John Gangitano was born in Melbourne on 22 April 1957. He went to two good Catholic schools, De La Salle College in Malvern and Marcellin College in Bulleen. It did not take. By his twenties he was a standover man, and by his thirties the newspapers had a name for him. They called him the Black Prince of Lygon Street, after the Carlton strip of cafes and restaurants where he held court.

Police and reporters saw him as the public face of a loose group of Carlton criminals known as the Carlton Crew. He was said to have money in a King Street nightclub, in fight promotion, in horse racing and in protection.

Mick Gatto, the big former heavyweight boxer who was the other famous name of the Carlton Crew, knew him for years. In his book with Tom Noble, Gatto describes a good bloke who changed as he got older. He took on the gangster image and, according to Gatto, people warned him that Gangitano was using a lot of drugs. A man would look at him the wrong way and he would go for him.

The record bears Gatto out. In 1987 Gangitano was at the centre of an attack in Lazar's nightclub on King Street in which the world champion boxer Barry Michael was badly beaten. According to Gatto, a fight at a Footscray club called Bunnies turned into a bloodbath, and Gangitano came out of a police station with his hands smashed and a lasting hatred of the police.

In 1995 he was charged with shooting dead a petty criminal, Gregory Workman, in St Kilda East. He never stood trial. Two witnesses took back their statements, and the case fell over.

On 19 December 1995 he was in the Sports Bar on King Street with a younger man called Jason Moran when a brawl broke out and a string of customers were badly hurt. Both men were charged. Moran was later heard admiring his friend's work. "He's a fucking lulu," he said. "If you smash five pool cues and an iron bar over someone's head, you're a fucking lulu."

Jason Moran was the son of Lewis Moran, a veteran of the Melbourne drug trade, and the half-brother of Mark Moran. The Morans were not the Carlton Crew, but in 1995 they drank with it, fought with it and did business beside it. Gangitano and Jason Moran had been friends for years.

By the end of 1997, according to later reports, there was money owing between the two camps.

The house in Templestowe was a long way from Lygon Street. It sat in the leafy east of the city, the sort of suburb men like Gangitano bought into when they wanted their children to have a garden.

On the evening of 16 January Kinniburgh had been drinking at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale. Afterwards he drove across the city to Gangitano's house. According to the evidence later put before the coroner, Jason Moran was there too.

Kinniburgh left shortly after eleven to buy cigarettes. While he was out, police came to believe, there was an argument, and somebody pulled a gun. Gangitano was shot in the arm and the head as he tried to get away towards the laundry at the back of the house. When Kinniburgh returned, about thirty minutes after he left, Gangitano was lying where he fell. His de facto wife, Virginia, was with the body when help came.

Kinniburgh kept to the old rule of silence. It drove the detectives to distraction. His blood on the flyscreen said he had been at the back of the house. It did not say what he had seen there, and he never told them.

At the funeral, Gatto was one of the men who carried the coffin. In his book he says the news was a shock but not a surprise. He had always known it would happen one day.

The inquest into Gangitano's death opened in January 2002. It was the first proper look the public had at the night, and it did not take long to find its two missing witnesses. Jason Moran and Graham Kinniburgh were both called. Both were excused from giving evidence, on the ground that what they said might incriminate them.

The coroner, Iain West, found that both men had been in the house the night Gangitano died, and that they were implicated in his death. A coroner's finding is not a conviction. Neither man was ever charged.

By then the war Gangitano's killing is said to have started was well under way. In June 2000 Mark Moran, Jason's half-brother, was shot dead as he got into his car outside his home in Aberfeldie. Carl Williams was later charged with his murder, and the charge was dropped when he pleaded guilty to others. Nobody has been convicted of it.

On 21 June 2003 Jason Moran was sitting in a van at the Cross Keys Reserve in Essendon North, watching his children at a football clinic, when a gunman walked up and shot him dead alongside his friend Pasquale Barbaro. Carl Williams later pleaded guilty to organising Moran's murder.

On 13 December 2003 Graham Kinniburgh was shot dead outside his home in Kew. In March 2017 a jury convicted a gunman, Stephen Asling, of his murder.

On 31 March 2004 Lewis Moran was shot dead in the Brunswick Club on Sydney Road. The two men in the house in Templestowe, and two other Morans, were dead. The question of who fired in the laundry had nobody left to answer it.

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Then, in 2015, somebody did.

Bertie Wrout was Lewis Moran's drinking partner. He was the man shot and wounded beside him in the Brunswick Club, and he survived a month in intensive care. He died after a long illness in June 2015. Soon afterwards the Herald Sun reported that he had made a confession before he went, and the story was carried around the country by the news agency AAP.

According to that report, Wrout said Lewis Moran had decided in 1998 that Gangitano had to die. The old man's reason, as Wrout told it, was that Gangitano was "going silly on cocaine" and "screaming" about a debt. Wrout said he gave Lewis Moran the gun. Wrout said the man who went to Gangitano's house and used it was not Jason Moran. It was his half-brother, Mark. The gun, he said, came back to him afterwards.

It is a dying man's account, given second-hand, about men who were all dead when he gave it. Nobody could cross-examine him, and nobody has ever been charged on the strength of it. It does not sit easily beside the coroner's finding, which put Jason Moran in the house. It sits a little more easily beside the rumour that had gone round Melbourne for years, which said there were Morans in that house and that the Munster went for cigarettes at a very convenient time.

So the record leaves two versions. In one, Jason Moran and Graham Kinniburgh were in the house, as a coroner found. In the other, as Bertie Wrout told it before he died, Mark Moran pulled the trigger with Wrout's gun on his father's say-so. Neither version has been tested by a jury. Every man named in either of them is dead.

Gangitano is generally counted as one of the first of the thirty or so men killed in Melbourne's gangland war between 1998 and 2010. He died in his own laundry, in the suburb he moved to for the quiet, while the one man who might have seen it was out buying cigarettes.

His old friend Mick Gatto tells the story of his life, and the night it ended, in our film on Gangland.