Carl Williams

Sundays for normal people are a little island away from the working week - a place filled with bacon and eggs, stretches on the couch, walks in the park and piping hot coffee. I’m a crime reporter for a weekly newspaper in Australia’s crime capital and my Sundays are usually a bit different. Sunday is typically the day I wake bleary-eyed to the sound of my ringing mobile closely followed by a spray of invective from some heavy character or other.

Sometimes it’s a colourful kickboxer or a colourful nightclub figure or a colourful race track identity who doesn’t like what I’ve written about him in that day’s paper. Sometime the unhappy customers who ruin my Sunday aren’t colourful at all – just angry criminals who have been convicted of serious offences.

On the scariest Sundays the voice on the line belongs to Roberta Williams.

Continue reading "Badlands: Getting on the wrong side of Fat Boy" »

This is, er, gold. Convicted killer and drug dealer Carl Williams - the crim who used to knock about in tracksuits - is being buried in a gold-plated coffin. There’s full coverage of the funeral here.

We can safely assume he’s not on one of those complete funeral packages advertised by earnest middle-aged people on daytime TV. Your sudden death as a result of an encounter with some exercise equipment could leave your family struggling to pay the bills. For as little as $1.50 a week you can have all the costs of your funeral covered, and for just 50c extra a week, we’ll throw in a comically gangsta gold coffin.

What has happened to this guy’s assets? What has been seized? And how much of his drug money is still sitting in a bank?

Continue reading "Where do I sign up for the Carl Williams funeral plan?" »

Carl Williams was a human being. But he was a human being in the physiological sense of the word. He breathed oxygen, had two arms and two legs, he had all the defining physical characteristics which qualified him for inclusion in the homo sapiens species.

But he was shorn of the emotional characteristics which define humanity – empathy, compassion and kindness, remorse, guilt and shame. He murdered three people - one of them a father in front of his children at a school football game – and sold drugs on such a massive scale that one can only speculate as to how many people were poisoned or even killed by using his products.

It’s been said this week by Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland and others that any death is a tragedy. But some deaths are more tragic than others, and like most people I struggle to feel any sense of sorrow at Williams’ death.

Continue reading "Our only regret is we didn’t get to murder Carl Williams" »

Carl Williams became a household name outside Victoria thanks to the first of the enormously successful TV series Underbelly, which is now in its third season on Channel 9.

Williams, a career criminal, died today as a result of head injuries inflicted in an assault by another inmate at Barwon Prison, where he was serving a minimum of 35 years for three murders.

Williams became something of a grotesque poster boy for Melbourne’s gangland war which came to national attention six years ago as tit-for-tat killings between rival drug gangs became increasingly daring and public. The brazen public murder of Jason Moran - shot dead along with a fellow criminal in a car park after attending a kids’ footy clinic - was something of a watershed moment in the war and it was masterminded by Williams.

Continue reading "Williams: part-time TV star, full-time crook, now dead" »