In Melbourne's gangland war, two names stood out as professional hitmen. Evangelos "Ange" Goussis was a former kickboxing champion who became a feared enforcer and a convicted contract killer. Keith Faure was a career criminal who had spent his life in and out of prison. Their names are tied to two killings in 2004: Lewis Moran, the old-school underworld veteran shot inside a crowded club, and Lewis Caine, the street enforcer found shot in the head. This film tells both men's stories, and ends on the question of loyalty, because in the end one of them had been talking to the police.
The film opens with a man who was at the bar with Lewis Moran when the gunman came in. He heard boots, and then Moran was shot. He pretended he had a gun of his own and tried to fight, and was hit in the arm and twice in the chest. One bullet passed through five or six organs, and his spleen had to be removed.
Keith Faure
Faure was born in June 1951 in Victoria, into a family rooted in crime: his grandfather was a notorious gangster in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1920s, who died violently in 1927. In 1976, during a botched robbery at the ANZ Bank in Clifton Hill, he shot Senior Constable Michael Pratt in the back. Pratt survived and, the film says, was later awarded the George Cross for bravery. Faure went to prison.
In Pentridge in the 1970s and 1980s he fell into a fierce rivalry with Mark "Chopper" Read. It was bloody: Faure's gang, associated with the Painters and Dockers, tried to take Chopper out, and Chopper famously had his own ears cut off in H Division. The 2000 film Chopper based the character Keithy George, played by David Field, on Faure, and showed him killed. That killing was fiction. Faure is reported to have been unhappy with his portrayal, and to have said so even at a minor traffic hearing.
Outside, his name carried weight. He was tied to the Painters and Dockers, known less for their trade than for contract killings, armed robbery and enforcement. If something needed doing, Faure was a man you called.
Ange Goussis
Goussis was born on 14 September 1967 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Greek parents who had fled their homeland during the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s. The family settled in Geelong, Victoria, in 1975, when he was eight. He found discipline in combat sports and rose to the top of Australian kickboxing, winning the World Kickboxing Association middleweight title in the early 1990s.
Working as a nightclub bouncer brought him into Melbourne's underworld. The film says he was convicted in November 1989 of attempted murder and heroin trafficking. After prison he tried a comeback, boxing in the mid-1990s, but the pull of the underworld stayed strong. He became the muscle for Nik "the Russian" Radev, a gangland figure in drug trafficking and extortion. That ended in April 2003, when Radev was shot dead in Queen Street, Coburg.
2004
Goussis then partnered with Faure. According to the film, the two became enforcers for factions fighting for control, and their partnership included the murder of Lewis Moran in March 2004.
Lewis Caine had killed before. At 23 he was thrown out of Lazar's nightclub after another man flashed a police badge he had been given. Caine took it as a humiliation, followed the man across the city in a taxi and beat and kicked him to death on Spencer Street, then went back to the club boasting. After a retrial he was sentenced in 1990 to 15 years for murder, and he served ten. Released in 2000, he wanted into the underworld. For two and a half years he was in a relationship with the criminal defence lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, who had first represented him on drink-driving charges.
Faure, the film says, did not like Caine. He thought him cocky, always borrowing money for drink and drugs and never paying it back. On 8 May 2004 they met at the Plough and Harrow Hotel. It was set up as a business discussion. Later that night Caine was found in Katawa Grove, Brunswick, shot in the head, execution style.
The informer
Within 11 days both Goussis and Faure were arrested. Goussis at first took responsibility, claiming Caine had pulled a gun that jammed, and that he fired in self-defence. The court did not accept it, and he was convicted of Caine's murder.
Then he learned that Faure was a police informer, and that Faure had implicated him in the murder of Lewis Moran. Goussis denies any part in it. He withdrew his earlier statements, and to this day he maintains he was a scapegoat in the Moran case. He is serving life with a minimum of 30 years, and the film says new evidence about police withholding material could give him a chance to appeal again.
Faure, as far as the narrator knows, is still in jail. His brother Noel Faure was also jailed over the Moran killing, and has since died. The film's conclusion is plain: in the criminal world, trust is worth nothing, and whoever is not watching his back is next.