Collingwood man Richard John Lovett (more recently of Bundoora) burgled he whom the press are carefully describing as ‘disgraced millionaire businessman’ Steve Vizard’s then Toorak mansion while Steve and the kids were at home slumbering. You may recall that little Stephanie V. woke up to find him rifling through her things, in her bedroom. Security cameras at the disgraced white collar feller’s lair had Lovett and a mate in the mansion for 40 minutes. Remarkably, after the altercation outside with Stephanie’s dad, that same evening Mr Lovett went on to burgle another house nearby. Then, in Collingwood the following day, he stabbed a man in the back, puncturing his lung, in the course of the Harmworth St liberation of a backpack, clothing, and a gold necklace in a street robbery graced by a 20cm long blade.

Harmsworth St and its environs, tucked up near the corner of Johnston and Hoddle Sts is definitely the spot to get stabbed. It runs into Perry St, locus of the yellow racer murder. Housing Commission territory.

Mr Lovett is an aboriginal father of four who has been a drug addict for the last 15 years, since he was 14. He was intoxicated by ice at the time of the Vizard burglary. He pleaded guilty just the other day.

County Court judge Barnett said discrimination prevented Aborigines getting work and there was no access to culturally-sensitive counselling. “Unfortunately for some Aborigines the sort of opportunities that are offered to them are something that in my mind are meaningless.” According to the Hun, his Honour ‘blasted treatment of repeat Aboriginal offenders and said the community had no sympathy or understanding of the problem. He said the man who robbed Steve Vizard’s Toorak mansion had little chance of rehabilitation because Aborigines were treated with misery and neglect. “We are putting them on shelves, we are warehousing them, we are not getting them back into the community and the community doesn’t seem to offer a solution”.

According to The Age’s Kate Hagan:

‘Defence counsel John Desmond said Lovett was institutionalised from the age of eight in state homes, youth training centres and prison.

He was abandoned by his abusive mother when he was 13, had no secondary school education and was a long-term drug user. Judge John Barnett said there were various facilities where he could simply “warehouse” Lovett, but traditional approaches were not working.

“It’s a case of Europeans saying, ‘do this, do that’, but they don’t listen, they don’t trust (them). It’s not Aborigines saying, ‘there’s a better way’,” he said.

Judge Barnett said the wider community did not offer solutions, just “neglect and misery”, and had “no sympathy or understanding of the real issues”.

“The world is full of deaf ears but the problem doesn’t go away, the problems keep coming back before the courts,” he said.

Prosecutor Ray Gibson said Lovett’s background was tragic and there was an obvious gulf between the life of a Melbourne Girls’ Grammar student (Stephanie Vizard) and Lovett.’

Mr Lovett’s accomplice, Eric Mark Lawson, drove the getaway car — an Alfa Romeo. He went in for a 6 year holiday courtesy of the Crown last month for an 11-week crime spree. Mr Lovett will be sentenced this week. It will be interesting to see how it compares with Mr Vizard’s $390,000 fine.

I have to say, Wellington St between Johnston St and Gertrude St is not a nice place. In fact, it’s the closest to a slum I know of in Melbourne (see pic of a side street off Wellington St).  At twenty to eight in the evening of Sunday 28 October 2007, a Collingwood man answered a knock on his Wellington St unit’s front door. Four black-clad men shot him in the lower body. He’s still alive. Sounds like a reprise of the gangland murders a bit too close to home for my liking.

By the 31st, Bou’ellas Kahalil, 32, had been arrested at Craigieburn police station and charged with seven offences including attempted murder, aggravated burglary, false imprisonment, intentionally causing serious injury, kidnapping and being in possession of an unregistered firearm. And another man from Port Melbourne, one-time home of Hizir Ferman, has been arrested and charged as well. See The Age’s article here.

Yesterday, the Police announced they’d like to have a little chat with Robert Musso of Mill Park, but said not to approach him. The Age reported in 2004 that a top cop, Simon Overland, was a bit frustrated with what he perceived to be the lack of assistance from the courts in the police’s efforts to quell the spate of gangland murders. The article said:

‘Police fury over the granting of bail to crime patriarch Lewis Moran, gunned down this week in a Brunswick gaming club, is well known. Police are also dismayed by a County Court decision to give known gunmen linked to two murders, Hizir Ferman and Robert Musso, 12 months’ jail for carrying firearms when law provides for a maximum penalty of 15 years. Both men were out on parole when the Special Operations Group apprehended them with loaded guns.’

Someone named Robert Musso has been in jail before. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment on 30 March 2004: R. v. Ferman and Musso, a sentence which the Court of Appeal later referred to in another man’s case as ‘manifestly inadequate’: DPP v Faure [2005] VSCA 9.

Musso claimed to have suffered injuries in jail. According to the judgment in Musso v Department of Justice [2004] VCAT 1268:

‘10 On 19 November 1999 there was a considerable disturbance in Port Phillip Prison. A prisoner was stabbed. A lock-down ensued. A group of prisoners, including the Applicants, were forcibly extracted from their cells in Swallow Unit for the purpose of relocating them in Charlotte Unit, which is apparently more secure. This extraction was carried out by members of the Tactical Operations Group (“TOG”). It is alleged, in essence, that, during this extraction and relocation, excessive force was used by TOG, and that prisoners suffered injuries as a result.’

Who knows? Perhaps it’s the same Robert Musso who is a suspect of this latest bit of attempted gunning down. And perhaps it’s the same Robert Musso who is referred to in this Bulletin article which says he was:

• a friend of Nick “the Russian” Radev;
• found with a .38 calibre revolver with live rounds in a bum bag and so was popped into jail;
• where he was stabbed up to 12 times in April by fellow inmates of Barwon Prison.

According to The Bulletin, Mark Mallia led the knife attack.

‘A knife attack last month of Robert Musso, a former ally of Nik “The Russian” Radev in Barwon prison by inmates loyal to Carl Williams shows how volatile the situation remains. The main attacker in the group hit has been named as a player in the murder of western suburbs drug dealer Mark Mallia. To understand the calibre of human being we are dealing with, it’s worth remembering how Mallia was killed. They tied him to a chair, bound and gagged and then probably tortured him with a soldering iron, before strangling him. They then poured petrol over him and set him on fire inside a wheelie bin, before chucking him down a stormwater drain.’

More recently, a case named DPP v Robert Musso & Khalil Bou’elias was listed for a hearing in the Supreme Court of Victoria on 15 December 2006.

It’s true. New airconditiong’s going to cost $1 million, repairs over the next 10 years to cost $12 million.  Looking for a tenant, or a buyer. My other post about the Town Hall is here. I think we should reclaim the slums around abouts, and give it and the park we would build to Princess Mary of Denmark; lure her back to Australia.

14. … Sometimes, groups seek to use the venue for parties and it is clear from Mr McFeely’s affidavit that these groups wish to look at the behaviour of the gay male patrons as a kind of spectacle or entertainment for the group’s enjoyment. Entry of these groups would undermine or destroy the unique atmosphere which aims to foster and not frighten or discomfit its gay male patrons.

…

20 The exemption … seeks to prevent discrimination against gay men, for whom this venue is designed. The anti-social behaviour which would be at the heart of a decision to refuse or restrict entry to groups of heterosexuals or lesbians is sexuality-based behaviour and includes sexuality-based insults and derision. It would be most unfortunate if at this venue, gay men were subjected to the very behaviour that the venue seeks to protect them from. I would add that I take a similar view of the restriction or refusal of entry to those groups who wish to use the venue for “hens’ nights” and the like, where they wish to use the gay male patrons as a form of entertainment. To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them. It is, although subtle, another form of sexuality-based humiliation or discrimination.’

Wellington St, Collingwood housing commission flats.

Reviewing is a difficult art. There are certain constrained forms I particularly like. The obituary. The chess column. The restaurant review. All so constrained by the necessaries, requiring clever use of what little room there is for the decorations. The English tend to do them best. Zia Mahmoud does the most with the least with The Guardian’s bridge column. Haiku fascinates me. The very word puts me on edge. I hate haiku about as much as shakuhachi music, but at the same time I love it about as much as a good egg breakfast, a short speech, photos of Japanese taking photos of cherry blossoms with unbelievably expensive cameras (snap thanks to a great photographer, Mark Alberding), and the way sacred cows get in the way of traffic in New Delhi. Short is good. Less is more. Small is beautiful. Metre is a useful discipline for the poet’s natural tendency to ungrammatical excess. Some of the most elegant writing going around today is to be found on this website. I particularly like:

After enough beers
My intelligence dazzles.
Others are jealous.

and

ugly red flowers
bloom on the floor of the bar
after the big brawl

and

Bagged a centerfold
But awakened to road kill
Damn you, beer goggles

All of which is an ironically long introduction to Jamie Wodetzki’s Breakfast Blog. He has concision down pat, and does well with the form of the restaurant review. Since first reading his blog, I was sure he was a lawyer. Many lawyers can’t write, but some can, and his writing had the ring of a lawyer who could write. A moment’s google searching confirmed my suspicions. See Jamie’s review of Cavallero here, Birdman Eating’s here, Cafe Rosamond’s here, Richmond’s New York Tomato Cafe’s here.

John Lethlean does well too. I think it would take some self-confidence for the town’s leading food critic to give Lentil as Anything a glowing thumbs up, but that’s what he did.

The Age reported yesterday that the median Abbotsford property sale price — that is the middle number when all the sales results are lined up in chronological order — was 12.7% higher in the first three months of this year compared with the last three months of last year. But there were fewer than 30 sales results in the line of numbers, and the data are therefore implicitly not statistically reliable. The median was $575,000 in the first 3 months of this year, compared with the median for the whole of Melbourne of $380,000, and the median for houses within 10 km of the city of $566,000 (that figure is up 15% on a year ago, compared with the whole of Melbourne figure which is up only 5.3%). Richmond and Collingwood were also up about 10%, but Fitzroy — also with fewer than 30 sales — and Clifton Hill were down about 5%. The median sale prices in the last 3 months were:

Abbotsford $575,000

Collingwood $533,250

Clifton Hill $531,250

Kew $993,500

Richmond $610,000

Fitzroy $572,500.

There was a blip in Carlton, where the median price was $945,000, up more than 50% on the median in the previous three months.

Dale Phillip Ward, formerly of Nicholson St, Abbotsford, fell into difficulties when his brother was convicted of murder, and committed suicide in jail in a drug overdose. His brother’s girlfriend was murdered too, her dismembered body dumped into the lake at Monash University. Ward used dope, amphetamines, ecstasy and ice, and developed a drug induced psychosis. Almost 2 years ago, in 2005, he stabbed Alex Cooper four times in the chest and once in the arm and killed him. He was charged with manslaughter and other offences from what the Herald Sun describes as “a crime spree”, and pleaded guilty. Sounds awfully like a plea bargain to me.  Update,  29 April  2007: more stabbings at more public housing estates.

The victim, a father of three, arrived in Perry St at the Dight Street public housing estate with a yellow racer he had just stolen. Ward’s half brother offered to buy it but the victim refused. So the half brother, then on methadone following a heroin addiction, put a knife to the victim’s throat, and there was a scuffle. Ward intervened by plunging the knife repeatedly, for which Justice Betty King — who moved on today to Carl Williams — gave him 8 with a minimum of 6. Whelan was jailed for 9 months for intentionally causing serious injury in an earlier hearing.

All in all, a sad story. I went for a walk around that area the other evening. There is great and grim ugliness in the block between Wellington St and Smith St.

All this is from The Age, story here, and the Herald Sun: story here. Previous posts here and here. Thanks to an American, Mo Riza, for the excellent snap.

Gertrude St is my preferred east-west bike artery into the heart of the city, but from time to time I find myself wandering along Gipps St, one block north. It boasts the Laird O’Cockpen Hotel which in my imagination might conceivably be the place that erotic poet and Liberal parliamentarian Bruce Atkinson visited out of professional obligation, as well as Nicholas Dattner’s emporium of super expensive wooden tables (did you know his old man was a British spy on whom Trevor Howard’s character was based in the 1949 zither music-rich The Third Man, one of the most famous films of all time?). It also sports the Glasshouse Hotel. I thought it was standing vacant, but I found out a year or so ago it was doing a roaring lesbian trade on certain evenings, and always had done. Now I find Maria from Dante’s in Gertrude St has bought the place. A little online pamphlet named Same Same says of the development:

‘Maria reveals that the Glasshouse will be maintaining its name and will be open for business from Tuesdays through to Sundays. Noted events will include the Flirt and Bitch is Black parties, plus cabaret, funk, karaoke, trannie, band and disco nights.

She describes the renovation as “classic – not as retro as Dante’s” but “in my style”.

Divine lookalike Feral Beral and ex Freakazoid DJ Arlen Da Silva are just two of the club identities linked to the new activities, with Feral Beral hinting that there will be “pole dancers and performance artists on most Friday and Saturday nights”. Up until recently, Arlen Da Silva was promoting Saturday nights at Laneway, a venue that sits at the rear of Seven. He is now also involved in Eve in Southbank with Jono Francisco and is famous for a disco/house/old school sound.’

and

‘Collingwood’s Glasshouse Hotel reopened on Thursday night with an invite only party featuring Madame Zuzu.

The party continues all weekend, with regular action each week from Wednesday through to Sunday announced.

Fridays feature DJ Arlen De Silva and misterjob playing a spectrum of music til 5am, with guests Fin on sax, Andy D on percussion, Luke McD, Chestwig, and upcoming guests Agent 86 on Friday 20 April and Butch on Friday 27 April, and Nick Whiteside on Friday 4 May and Nigel Last on Friday 18 May.

Saturdays are to be known as the Glasshouse Variety Club and are hosted by Shirley Billings who will reside over a night of comedy, burlesque and “general hilarity”. Dinner is available from 6pm and the show starts at 9pm, followed by resident DJs Ennio Styles, RaMBL aka Richard Campbell and Declan Kelly til 5am. Entry on Saturdays is free.

The Glassy is open on Sundays from 12 noon for a classic Sunday roast for $15, with chilled beats all day from Fin and Andy D, and Dolly’s Karaoke Kaberet from 8pm.

Then on Wednesday, it’s a night of Salsa dancing with Emma. Salsa classes are at 6.30pm and 7.30pm, beginners are welcome, and it’s $10 entry.

Local bands play exciting new music every Thursday from 9pm, with $2.50 pots, $10 pizza and pot! Yay!

And ahead on Saturday 28 April, the Glasshouse hosts the 7th anniversary F.L.I.R.T. The Love Machine party, with dare devil disco drivers SMUDJ, Pixleton, Dee Dee with Slack and Antediluvian Rocking Horse. $15 entry.

The Bitch is Black is scheduled for Saturday 5 May.

The Glasshouse is open for lunch, dinner, snacks and wine every Tuesday to Thursday 11am – 1am, Friday and Saturday 11am – 5am, and Sunday 12 noon to midnight.’