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Carl Williams should have been as safe inside Barwon Prison's Acacia unit as the people of Melbourne were from him.

The 39-year-old underworld boss was held in a modern maximum security wing in one of Australia's most secure jails, sitting off Bacchus Marsh Rd on open, flat country near the port city of Geelong.
Other notorious criminals have survived there.
Gangland lawyer Mario Condello, charged with conspiring to murder Williams, died only when he was released on bail to stand trial.
Others remain alive behind Barwon's walls: Julian Knight, who killed seven and injured 19 in the 1987 Hoddle street massacre; serial killer Paul Denyer; drug trafficker and Williams' associate Tony Mockbel; and Francesco Mangione, who killed a cousin in a Mister Whippy turf war.
But on Monday, as Williams sat reading a newspaper in a common room with two trusted inmates, he was bludgeoned to death with an exercise bike bar.
He triggered the decade-long gangland wars that killed as many as 30 victims by revenge attacks on the rival Moran clan after he was shot in the stomach during a dispute over the amphetamines trade.
The carnage of the war was often brutally public. Jason Moran, scion of the long-established crime family, was shot dead with associate Barbaro Pasquale in front of five children.
His father Lewis was gunned down in a Brunswick club. Others were killed in a supermarket carpark, in busy city streets, and outside shops and restaurants.
Williams was known to have been responsible for the deaths of at least 10 rivals. He pleaded guilty to four, and to conspiring to murder another, in a deal that put him behind bars for a minimum 35 years but gave him some hope of dying a free man.
Between them, Williams and his enemies virtually wiped each other out. Infamous former gangster Mark "Chopper" Read noted on Adelaide radio: "There's only me and (underworld identity) Mick Gatto left."
But the Acacia Unit murder has opened an entire new set of wounds for Melbourne. Even if police believe renewed killings are unlikely to erupt among the survivors, the wars have left a vacuum that others will fight to fill.
And in a city too often rocked in the past by corruption, the nature of Williams' death and possible links to bent police are too obvious to ignore.
Posted by Fraser Trevor at 21:38 Labels:

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