The story is like the plot of a Coen brothers film: A couple frustrated by their inability to conceive snatch a three-week-old baby from a shopping centre. After widespread media coverage the child is found abandoned in a derelict house. When those charged appear in court, their greatest fear is not the law but the man mouthing threats in the public gallery, an alleged gangster whose child was kidnapped.
The events played out last week in Melbourne, a city which few outsiders associate with organised crime. But Mark and Cheryl McEachran had taken the child of Joe Barbaro, an alleged drug dealer with links to the city’s organised crime scene. His cousin Pasquale Barbaro was a bodyguard whose murder at a junior sports training club last year woke Melbourne up to the reality of its new gang war.
Melbourne cherishes its reputation as Australia’s most genteel city. The broad boulevards of the town centre are lined with chic clothing shops, theatres and cafes. The contrast to its brasher rival Sydney is underlined by tourist adverts shot in black-and-white around the splendour of Australia’s most exclusive hotel, the Windsor.
Walking 400 yards round the corner from the Windsor brings you to the Melbourne Club, a 166-year-old institution for the Australian establishment. Its upstart rival the Athenaeum, a mere 130 years old, is just over the road.
A mile north the city enters very different territory, a district long been ruled by tough guys with names like Alphonse Gangitano and Big Mick Gatto.
The cafes and pizza restaurants of inner-city Carlton have formed the backdrop to a gang war which has claimed the lives of 27 people in Melbourne since 1998. With each killing, the links between Melbourne’s exclusive establishment and its murky underworld seem to grow closer.
But the glamour of the criminal life has always had an attraction in a city built on a 19th-century gold rush. ‘The growth industry in Melbourne is selling dark sunglasses,’ said John Silvester, a crime reporter on Melbourne’s Age newspaper for more than 20 years.
Graham ‘the Munster’ Kinniburgh, a former safecracker who rose to become a kingpin of the city’s crime scene before he was shot dead outside his home last December, was well-known for his discreet connections to Melbourne’s establishment.
When his son married into one of the city’s established families in 1994, the reception was at the Windsor. A few months before his death, his daughter married the son of a former attorney-general. Despite this outward respectability, the meetings Kinniburgh held in Carlton’s cafes in the week before his murder read like a Rolodex of local undesirables.
Most telling of all was the meeting with a detective from Melbourne’s criminal investigation branch. In recent years 13 detectives from Victoria police’s drug squad have been charged with corruption following a failed plan to catch the state’s amphetamine dealers by becoming players in the market.
A former Victoria police detective said such corruption was inevitable. ‘Whether it’s the community or the police, money corrupts and massive amounts of money corrupt massively,’ he said.
The launching of taskforce Ceja in an attempt by the police force to clean themselves up saw corruption turn from drugs and theft to outright threats against fellow officers.
At the beginning of May a Ceja investigator opened his mail to find two police-issue bullets, etched with his and his wife’s names. A fortnight later Terrence Hodson, a former speed dealer who was due to testify against two senior police officers in a corruption inquiry, was murdered with his wife just a quarter of a mile from the local police station.
Less than two weeks later, an alleged underworld killer was charged with contempt of court when he refused to testify against four police officers on corruption charges, saying that he feared for his family’s safety.
‘Over the years all sorts of internal police have had threats and it goes with the territory,’ says a former detective. ‘You know, in my world I lived with a lot of threats, and you feel somewhat comfortable when you get threats. It’s when you don’t get threats you should worry.’
The couple awaiting trial for baby kidnapping are hoping that is true. – Guardian Unlimited Â