Ange Goussis and Keith Faure, the hit men who fell out

The man in the balaclava came through the door of the Brunswick Club on a Wednesday night in March 2004, and Lewis Moran, a veteran of the Melbourne drug trade, had nowhere to go but a corner.

The club on Sydney Road was packed. Moran was at the bar with his friend and drinking partner, Bertie Wrout. The gunman found Moran cowering in the corner and shot him twice. The second shot went into the back of his head. A second gunman shot Wrout, who spent a month in intensive care and lived.

Five years later a judge looked at the man convicted of the first shooting and told him what he was. "Your role was that of a paid assassin," Justice Betty King said. "You had no grievance with either of these men, you didn't even know them."

Your role was that of a paid assassin

Justice Betty King, sentencing Goussis, 2009

The man in the dock was a former world champion kickboxer. The man who helped put him there was his partner.

They made a strange pair. Keith George Faure was born in June 1951 in Norlane, on the edge of Geelong, into a family that had been in crime for three generations. His grandfather was Norman Bruhn, a Sydney gangster of the 1920s, who was shot dead in 1927. One of his brothers served fourteen years for murdering his girlfriend. Another, Noel, was convicted of manslaughter over a killing in 1990.

Keith was the hardest of them. In 1976, robbing an ANZ bank in Clifton Hill, he shot Senior Constable Michael Pratt in the back. Pratt survived and was later awarded the George Cross for his bravery that day, but his injuries forced him out of the police. Faure got four years. In the same years he collected two manslaughter convictions, one of them for the killing of another prisoner in Pentridge.

Inside Pentridge in the 1970s and 1980s, Faure fought a long prison war with Mark "Chopper" Read. It became famous because Read wrote about it, and then because the film Chopper turned Faure into a character called Keithy George, played by David Field, who is stabbed to death early in the story. Faure was very much alive. He was reported to be unhappy with the portrayal.

Evangelos Goussis was sixteen years younger. He was born on 14 September 1967 in Tashkent, in what was then the Soviet Union, to a Greek family who had fled their own country's civil war. They came to Australia when he was eight and settled in Geelong. He was a natural fighter. He won the first Lionel Rose Shield as an amateur boxer and was in contention for the 1988 Seoul Olympics before he missed the team. In the early 1990s he won the World Kickboxing Association middleweight title.

He was already living two lives. In November 1989 he was convicted of attempted murder and heroin trafficking. When he came out, he had three professional boxing fights in the mid-1990s and won two. Then he went back to the other job.

By 2004 Melbourne was in the middle of a gang war. Men were being shot in their cars, their driveways and their local parks, and somebody had to do the shooting. Faure and Goussis, the old Pentridge hand and the Geelong champion, went into business together.

Lewis Caine was the kind of man the gang war made. In 1988, aged twenty-three, he had been thrown out of Lazar's nightclub on King Street, followed a man he blamed for it, and kicked him to death. He was sentenced to fifteen years with a minimum of ten, and he was released in June 2000. He came out wanting to be somebody in the underworld. For two and a half years he lived with a young criminal defence lawyer, Zarah Garde-Wilson, who had first represented him on a drink-driving charge.

He moved in big circles. The night before he died, he had dinner with Carl Williams and his wife Roberta. On the night of Saturday 8 May 2004, he went to meet Keith Faure.

The invitation was Faure's. He and Goussis drove up from Geelong and met Caine at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Carlton. At about eleven o'clock that night Caine was found in Katawa Grove, a dead-end street in Brunswick, with a single bullet wound to the head.

The police were not slow. On 19 May 2004, eleven days later, the Special Operations Group arrested Goussis and Faure in Geelong.

Goussis admitted he had shot Caine once in the head. His story was that Caine had pulled a gun on him first, that it had jammed, and that he had fired in self-defence. The jury did not believe him. On 3 November 2005 both he and Faure were convicted of Caine's murder. They were the first murder convictions to come out of Melbourne's gangland war.

That should have been the end of the partnership. It was the beginning of the second half of the story.

Faure was fifty-four and looking at the rest of his life in prison. In December 2005, at his committal hearing over the Brunswick Club shooting, he collapsed in the dock with a suspected stroke. Not long afterwards he did what men of his generation had always said they would never do. He pleaded guilty, and he agreed to give evidence against others in both murders in return for a lighter sentence.

On 3 May 2006 he was sentenced. For the murder of Lewis Moran he got life, with a minimum of nineteen years. For the murder of Lewis Caine he got twenty-four years. For a man who had admitted two murders in six weeks, it was the best deal he was ever going to get.

His brother Noel was also convicted over the Moran killing and was given a minimum of twenty-three years. Carl Williams, the man at the centre of the war, pleaded guilty in 2007 to organising it.

For Goussis, it meant his partner was now a witness for the Crown.

The case against Goussis for the Brunswick Club came to trial in 2008. The Crown relied on the evidence of a career criminal, never named in the reports, who admitted he had driven the getaway car. On 29 May 2008 a jury found Goussis guilty of the murder of Lewis Moran.

In February 2009 Justice King sentenced him to life, with a minimum of thirty years before he could be considered for parole. She said it was a miracle that nobody else in the crowded club had been killed. Outside, Moran's widow Judy, who had now buried Lewis and both her sons, gave the press her own verdict. "I hope he rots in hell, I really do," she said.

Goussis has always denied that he was in the Brunswick Club. In the years after his conviction, questions were raised about the evidence against him, including claims that a key witness's contradictory accounts had been rewritten to match police phone records. In 2014 he published his own account, alleged police misconduct, and called for a royal commission.

He was also charged with another gangland murder, the 2003 shooting of Shane Chartres-Abbott. On 8 July 2014 a Victorian Supreme Court jury found him and his two co-accused not guilty.

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So the two hit men of the Melbourne gangland war ended up in the same prison system serving very different sentences for the same two killings. One fired the shot in Katawa Grove, by his own admission, and has always sworn he was not in the Brunswick Club. The other confessed to both murders and walked into the witness box against his partner.

Lewis Moran died in that corner nine months after his son Jason was shot dead watching a children's football clinic. Lewis Caine died in a dead-end street after a drink with men he thought were business partners. The judge said Goussis had no grievance with the men in the Brunswick Club. It was a job.

Faure had spent most of his adult life in Pentridge among men who despised informers. When it came to it, breaking the rule was worth a minimum of nineteen years, and he broke it.

We tell the story of both men, and of the night at the Brunswick Club, in our film on Gangland.