Notorious Australian mobster Carl Williams was buried in a golden coffin yesterday after a lavish funeral which drew a large crowd of mourners and blanket media coverage after his savage jailhouse murder.
The plump Williams, known as the baby-faced killer, was killed in Victoria state’s highest security prison earlier this month by a fellow inmate who attacked him with part of an exercise bike.
The 39-year-old was a key figure in Melbourne’s brutal underworld war of the 1990s and immortalized in the popular TV series Underbelly. His ex-wife Roberta Williams and their daughter Dhakota arrived for the funeral and left in a black stretch Hummer limousine.
PHOTO: AFP
“You gave me self-belief and confidence when it had been ripped away years before,” the black-clad Roberta, eulogizing her ex-husband, told about 100 mourners at St Therese’s Catholic Church in the Melbourne suburb Essendon.
A woman impersonating Melbourne underworld matriarch Judy Moran, whose husband Lewis and son Jason were killed on Williams’ orders, also turned up at the service clutching an urn before being led away by police.
The woman said Judy Moran, who is in jail awaiting trial for the murder of her brother-in-law, would have loved to have seen the funeral of her gangland nemesis.
The dead mobster’s casket, reportedly a gold-plated coffin which cost A$30,000 (US$27,885) and based on the model used for Michael Jackson, was carried out of the church under gray skies.
A heavy police presence guarded the church, which was previously used for the service for Lewis Moran as well as Williams’ mother, who died last year from a drug overdose, while the primary school next door was in lock-down.
Williams was serving a life sentence with a 35-year non-parole period for ordering the murders of several rivals.
He was a central figure in Melbourne’s violent criminal war which began in the late 1990s and eventually claimed more than 25 lives, with a sentencing judge describing him as a “puppet master” who decided who lived and who died.
A 36-year-old man, who cannot be named, has been charged with his prison murder.
Williams once said he acted to protect his family, comparing his situation to soldiers fighting a war.
“Every day soldiers have to kill the enemy, otherwise the enemy will kill them, and no-one calls soldiers murderers,” Williams wrote in correspondence given to a commercial television station. “The people I killed were far worse people than I will ever be ... I never killed or harmed any innocent people.”
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