For The Age crime journalist John Silvester and former Victoria Police commander and Purana Taskforce officer Stuart Bateson, there is still one contract murder that still guts them to this day.
It was the moment in 2003 when drug dealer Michael Marshall was shot in front of his five-year-old son in South Yarra. When police arrived, the child told them he wasn’t allowed to cross the road without holding his dad’s hand.
“We tend to treat these gangsters as two-dimensional because it’s like a movie,” says Silvester, who features in the three-part documentary Naked City: Hitmen, which covers the gangland wars that terrorised the city from 1998 until 2010. “But the glamour of the underworld is overstated. You need to go to the funerals and see the real grief of the families.”
In the miniseries, which reveals unseen police vision and covert audio recordings, Bateson shares the police perspective. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to tell the story and give some insight into what many of my colleagues are so proud of,’” says Bateson.
At the time, the late crime boss Carl Williams was recorded making a threat to kill Bateson and his girlfriend.
“I knew I was getting under his skin,” says Bateson. “So in some ways I looked at it as a plus. And I knew if we continued to apply pressure to him, he would end up making mistakes. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Bateson had surprisingly little personal security at the time.
“Victoria Police, in their wisdom, did a security audit on my home and they supplied me with an alarm light box to put on the front of my house,” says Bateson, who now counsels retired police officers. “It wasn’t even connected to an alarm. But we were very conscious about our own security. We made sure we weren’t followed on the way home by taking different routes. We made sure we weren’t in one spot on regular occasions.
“Because you had that hypervigilance for many years, I think that contributed to many of us struggling with PTSD. But it was just a sign of the times. I think Victoria Police do it so much better now.”
Bateson admires the officers who are working to dismantle the criminal gangs that are today waging war on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney. “They have an incredibly hard job,” says Bateson. “Perhaps harder than we ever had it, because not only are they dealing with organised crime, but the level of public protest and the violence that’s occurring during these times, and the need to maintain public trust through all that, just makes their job incredibly difficult.”
Produced by Michael Venables and Graham Watson, whose previous work is rooted in reality television, the miniseries eschews re-enactments for location shots, crime-scene photographs and a metal pill-press grinding away in a dirty room, which becomes an ominous character in its own right. Other former members of the Purana Taskforce are interviewed, as is former Supreme Court judge Betty King KC. All shed light on their chilling interactions with killers for hire.
Silvester says: “These hit men graduated, if you like, from being armed robbers, and for some – not all – the jump from pointing a gun and terrorising innocent people, to using a gun to kill, is not that big a jump.”
Bateson believes hit men are born, not made.
“It may be ingrained in your upbringing,” says Bateson. “But to be able to murder someone for money means you have to have no emotion about it, or the ability to separate that emotion. And the ones that I met were cold-blooded killers. I wouldn’t have wanted to turn my back on them for a second. Even though we ended up recruiting them as witnesses, I was always conscious that they were cold-blooded killers.”
Naked City: Hitmen airs at 9pm on Wednesdays, 9pm, on Nine and 9Now.
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Bridget McManus is a television writer and critic for Green Guide. She was deputy editor of Green Guide from 2006 to 2010 and now also writes features and interviews for Life & Style in The Saturday Age and M magazine in The Sunday Age.
