In HM Prison Barwon, Victoria's highest-security jail, the Melbourne gangland boss Carl Williams sat in a secure unit reading a newspaper. He was serving life for murder, and he was still making headlines. Matthew Johnson, known as the General, walked up behind him with an iron bar taken from the frame of an exercise bike and struck him on the head, again and again. A jury later found Johnson guilty of murder. The court also heard something that turned the case into more than prison violence: before he died, Williams had been helping police try to solve a notorious double murder.
A prediction on the radio
A year earlier, Mark "Chopper" Read had said on live radio that Williams, a drug lord with a boyish face, would be in danger in any shower block in any jail in the country. Being a drug lord, Read said, earned no respect inside. Respect belonged to men who could fight, or who were very quick with a hammer or an iron bar and would use it at once. A year later the words proved accurate.
Johnson had once been friendly with Williams. The film asks whether the killing was prison politics or something deeper.
The man with the iron bar
Johnson was not a household name, but for anyone who had crossed him his reputation was violence. His record ran to 167 prior convictions: armed robbery, assault, gun possession, burglary. Three years before Williams was killed, Johnson and an accomplice went on a spree against random victims. A mother was dragged from her car at gunpoint outside a McDonald's, and her teenage daughter was punched in the face by Johnson's associate. Later Johnson stormed a home and robbed a couple at gunpoint, wrongly believing they were drug dealers. Police found him sitting in a stolen car in a railway station car park.
Prison, the film says, was never a deterrent. It was his natural environment. By 21 he had already been locked up in Pentridge, and the system refined him rather than reformed him. Inside he was a leader, the self-proclaimed general of a prison gang called Prisoners of War, built on old criminal codes of loyalty and violence. Informers were the lowest of the low.
Years before Williams, he tried something similar. He and other prisoners spent 45 minutes dismantling a security window to reach a protected prisoner, a known informer, and Johnson beat him with a seat from an exercise bike. That man survived. The trial became known as the trial from hell: one prisoner threw a bag of excrement at the jury box, others bared their backsides, and Johnson broke wind into the courtroom microphone while smirking at the judge.
Carl Williams
Before Barwon, Williams had been the most powerful figure in Melbourne's underworld, at the centre of one of Australia's bloodiest gangland wars. He received three life sentences, with a non-parole period of 35 years, for murdering the crime patriarch Lewis Moran, his son Jason and the drug dealer Mark Mallia, and a 25-year term for plotting to kill his rival Mario Condello. The judge called him a coward, a killer who never pulled the trigger himself but paid others to do it.
He was a celebrity gangster and the subject of Underbelly, which he watched and hated; he told his mother it painted him as brain-dead. He was also said never to eat at the same restaurant twice.
The Hodson murders
On 16 May 2004, Terrence Hodson, a career criminal turned police informer, and his wife Christine were found shot in the back of the head in their home in Kew East, their hands bound. Christine had no part in her husband's crimes. Hodson had been caught over a burglary carried out with Detective David Miechel, and had become an informer against corrupt police, notably Detective Paul Dale. He turned down witness protection. Information identifying him as an informer leaked into criminal circles.
In prison, Williams began working with the authorities and made statements that Paul Dale, a former drug squad detective, had approached him to have Hodson killed because Hodson was about to give evidence against him. In return, Williams received support for his family; reports said police paid $8,000 in private school fees for his daughter.
It was common knowledge in Barwon, the jury heard, that Williams was helping police. Johnson had copies of Williams' police statements on his computer. He told the jury they had been put there by Williams or another cellmate. But in a recording made a month after the killing, he whispered to his best friend on a prison visit that he had come across the statements on Williams' computer himself.
The verdict
Johnson denied killing Williams because he hated informers. He said Williams had told him the whole case against Dale was a yarn he had spun to police. He claimed self-defence, alleging Williams meant to kill him. The jury rejected it and convicted him of murder.
With Williams dead, the film says, the allegations against Dale fell through, and the conspiracy rumours only deepened. Williams' reign was deadly and it ended brutally. The film asks for sympathy for the families of every victim, torn apart over money, greed and revenge. Johnson remains in prison, and the film doubts he will ever be released.