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needed to offer deals that were too good to refuse. In doing so, they have changed the model of plea bargaining in Victoria forever.
    Purana police had previously refused to do deals with trigger men but senior police and legal strategists in the Office of Public Prosecutions decided it was more important to nail the underworld generals that ordered the killings than the soldiers who carried them out.
    From early in the investigation police had two main targets, Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel. They knew one was behind the killings and they suspected the other.
    Paid killers can expect life in prison with no chance of release. Their crimes are not based on passion or psychological problems but greed.
    But under the Purana model some of Melbourne’s worstgangsters were offered a chance of freedom if they turned on Williams and Mokbel.
    Men who had spent decades in jail and had never talked were courted. By now they were middle-aged and the thought of never being released was too much to contemplate.
    The Purana taskforce used the proven US tactic of turning alleged hit men into star witnesses. The most notorious of these was Salvatore ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano, a former underboss of the New York Gambino family.
    The first to do a deal was The Driver. He was sentenced to eighteen years with a minimum of ten for his role in the murder of Michael Marshall and he was never charged with his involvement in the killings of Mark Moran, Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.
    It was a dream deal for a man who could have faced a life sentence — and for the police, because he was the domino who made the others fall.
    â€˜Without him we wouldn’t have been able to move on Cross Keys (the Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro murder),’ Horgan said later.
    But it was The Runner’s confessions that finally tipped the balance — implicating Williams in six murders and exposing Mokbel’s alleged role in the underworld war.
    The Runner was moved from his prison in Victoria and is believed to be interstate. He was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years for the murders of Marshall, Barbaro and Jason Moran. He will be in his early 70s before being eligible for release.
    Police were confident they could make a case against Tony Mokbel for murder. So, it would seem, was Mokbel.
    Days before being found guilty of cocaine trafficking in March 2006 Mokbel jumped bail and disappeared. But police say it wasnot the fact that he would be sentenced to a manageable term (a minimum of nine years) for drug trafficking that made him run.
    In the week before Mokbel disappeared a lawyer had given him The Runner’s secret statements, tipping him off he was likely to be charged with murder.
    On 20 March, he fled. But the Purana taskforce was always confident he would surface and began to dismantle his financial empire. In February 2007 Mokbel was charged with Lewis Moran’s murder. And in June, despite being disguised with a bad wig, he was arrested in Greece and a few weeks later charged with the murder of Michael Marshall. Leaving aside his drug convictions and his decision to jump bail, juries will judge his guilt or innocence on the fresh charges at a later date.
    Once The Runner made his statements, Williams knew there was no chance he could beat the mounting charges. Williams was convicted of the Marshall murder and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years. The verdict was suppressed because he had multiple trials pending, including the murders of Mark Moran and the murders of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.
    For months, Williams secretly tried to negotiate a deal that gave him some chance of release and in February 2007, on the eve of his trial for the murders of Jason Moran and Barbaro, he finally pleaded guilty.
    By August 2006 the manipulator who once had teams of hit men prepared to kill for him knew he was facing the rest of his life in jail. Several of his trusted offsiders had cut deals with prosecutors, leaving him