Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy
Melissa Gregg and Jason Wilson
Introduction – Barbarians at the Gate
Sitting down to the April 23rd 2008 screening of the true crime drama Underbelly, Brisbane viewers may have been perplexed by the first commercial break, featuring an advertisement for Victorian Tourism. The genteel strains of indie folk starlet Joanna Newsom singing “The Sprout and The Bean” as a young girl followed an oversized ball of string around the city were an unusual foil following the opening scene of “Barbarians at the Gate”, in which the fictionalized Carl Williams calls Derryn Hinch’s radio program to deny involvement in a number of unsolved murders. This scene occurred well into the narrative arc of the first season of the Nine Network series, which involved a succession of up to 30 killings in Melbourne’s criminal underworld during the years 1993-2004, alongside the often hapless efforts of police to restore order. Why anyone would be contemplating Melbourne as a holiday destination in light of the show’s sordid account of this history of bloodshed and violence is just one question this paper is inspired to answer.
From a certain point of view, advertising for Melbourne’s tourist economy and Underbelly’s preoccupation with crime, sex and murder are hardly so contradictory. The wildly successful series can be seen in retrospect to have deepened and enriched the city’s brand appeal to a range of demographics. Evidence includes new, dedicated “Melbourne Crime Tours” operating through traditional small business and popular media avenues alike. These enterprises only coincide with the city’s makeover as a hub for creative industries, cultural tourism and the so-called “night-time economy”, exemplified in the ACMI development at Federation Square, the “small bar” culture envied by other national capitals, and various underground scenes celebrated in an annual Laneway Festival and documentary series like Not Quite Art.
Underbelly’s place in the creative economy of Melbourne, and the significance of its subsequent departure to Sydney and a NSW Government-sponsored production base, are part of a wider set of issues about the legitimate and underground economies in effect in Underbelly’s narrative material, and in its screening and reception. We can see no better demonstration of this than a scene from later on in “Barbarians At the Gate”, where the death of Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin in suspicious circumstances in the backroom of a Lygon Street restaurant is memorably depicted. The pivotal moment of Veniamin’s death at the hands of Mick Gatto is intercut with a series of shots illustrating the brewing and filtering of a classically prepared Italian barista coffee. Melbourne’s much-vaunted café culture is here linked with a city-wide network of organized crime and the entrenched business hierarchies presumed of a particular segment of the city’s significant Italian population. Underbelly couches murder – in this episode and others – in terms of changing leisure and consumption practices. If in this episode it is tied to the image of café culture that has spread throughout the country, other plots in the series figure murder as an externality of the night-time economy that has rejuvenated Australia’s inner cities. In Underbelly, even an espresso isn’t innocent; like the Charcoal Chicken restaurant Carl favours as the place to order a hit, it is a vernacular point of entry for the show to investigate the social, economic, ethnic and gender anxieties that defined recent decades.
Marketing campaigns for Season One placed images in a range of urban topographies that could be associated with scenes of criminality and intrigue, for instance under railway lines [Figure 1] and close to late-night strips [Figure 2].
Figure 1. Tunnel advertising for Season One near Marrickville Station, Sydney
Figure 2. Footpath campaign for steel case box-set, Erskineville Road, Sydney
In addition the franchise pursued a recognisable format heading in to Season Two, A Tale of Two Cities, with in-store product placement echoing the street-level symbolism of police tape and chalk-outlined bodies [Figure 3].
Figure 3. Underbelly stand, Terminal 3 Bookshop, Sydney Domestic Airport
At a time when global media theories speak of “trans-media convergence” (Jenkins 2006) Underbelly reveals the steadfastly local dimensions affecting television production, consumption and circulation. This paper describes three aspects of this trend.
1. Underbelly’s extension and renovation of an established public appetite for true crime narratives. The show repeatedly associates criminal violence with suburban material aspiration, presenting such events as alternatively continuous with and dangerous to Australian suburban life. By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in the mouths of criminals, and by situating these stories in the suburbs, Underbelly suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the Australian Dream. Our analysis shows how casting choices trigger complex mediatised memories that further compromise the viewer’s reading of criminal characters.
2. Underbelly’s depiction of the brutal economies of drug production and distribution, which underwrote ecstasy consumption in the golden age of Australian club culture. Exposing a generation’s denial of the criminal elements behind ecstasy’s fetishised status, Underbelly chastens celebratory accounts of club culture, shedding light on the infrastructure behind the leisure economies of our inner cities.
3. Underbelly’s capacity to offer a retrospective genealogy for the spectacular, drug-inflected, criminal hypermasculinity which is now – in the bodies and behaviours of professional sports stars in particular – a visible part of the Australian mainstream. Connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality, the series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia's present, one that countervails the official pieties of “the ordinary” that characterised the Howard years (Brett 2005; Brett & Moran 2006; Gregg 2007), and troubles the political priorities of today’s law and order state.
Underbelly as true crime TV.
At one level, Underbelly enacts a bankable genre in publishing, cinema and television: true crime. Along with other examples like horror (Carroll 1990), true crime is a cross-media genre with a long history, yet it has avoided the same degree of critical attention as a platform encompassing print, television, cinema, photography and even electronic entertainment.[1] True crime stories offer heightened, narrativised versions of historical criminal events. As moral campaigners justly argue, they turn criminals and their activities into a species of entertainment. For this reason, true crime as a popular literary form has often been seen as disreputable, and open to the charge of being exploitative, as crimes up to and including mass murder are turned into money-making forms of consumption. But it is also a way of addressing anxieties – whether they relate specifically to crime and disorder, or have a broader reference (Murley 2008; Seltzer 2006).
True crime is related but distinct from two neighbouring genres. Crime reporting as a form of journalism clearly shares the preoccupations of true crime (and sometimes personnel – the authors of the Underbelly books are themselves crime reporters) but crime reporting is produced under different circumstances, on a different timescale, for a different, less specialised audience. True crime writing has tended to appear in books or in specific magazines, and while crime reporting always has journalism’s alibi of keeping citizens informed, true crime writing struggles to place itself as history or criminology. It always faces the charge that its appeal is to prurience, morbid curiosity, or even to dark sexual urges. True crime also needs to be distinguished from crime fiction, although that distinction is less secure than at first it might appear (Seltzer 2006). While clearly true crime deals with actual events and crime fiction is essentially imaginative, more successful true crime writers purposefully focus on recounting events with a strong focus on characterisation and narrative shape, and tend to mix up their accounts with moralising asides or black humour.
While it draws ultimately on real events, Underbelly is an adaptation of Leadbelly (2004), from the Underbelly true crime series by Melbourne writers John Silvester and Andrew Rule. These authors started as well-connected crime writers for Fairfax’s The Age newspaper in Melbourne (Silvester’s father was deputy Victorian Police Commissioner, and later head of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence). They moved beyond this into publishing as editors and quasi-ghost writers for the initial volumes in Melbourne criminal Mark “Chopper” Read’s Chopper series.[2] Starting as true crime, these books generally defied categorisation, bringing together idiosyncratic stories of criminal autobiography, self-aggrandising tall tales, poetry, black humour, and, eventually, crime fiction. They aided in the development of Chopper Read’s peculiar celebrity in Australia, making him a regular in tabloid newspapers and TV current affairs, as well as a marketable touring speaker, at least until his recent illness. The books also inspired the Australian film, Chopper (Dominik 2000), itself now a true crime classic, and the launching pad for actor Eric Bana’s Hollywood career.
Following the successes of the early Chopper books in the 1990s, from 1997 Rule and Silvester turned to writing the Underbelly series. The Underbelly books were comparatively loosely organized, providing chapter-by-chapter collections of shorter true crime tales. Understandably, they were Melbourne-focused, given that this was the beat and milieu for the co-authors, and the location for which they had the biggest archive of journalism. The books also contained stories from around Australia. Their local origins made them stand out in the larger true crime market, but so too did a distinctive writing style. Despite the writers’ background at The Age, the books employed a refined tabloid register: jokey and clipped, but sometimes also caustically judgemental about the moral and intellectual failings of the criminals whose world they detailed.
The books foregrounded the peripheral world of criminal and drug cultures, violence and murder – the sociopathic social networks rarely mapped in Australia in other media or genres. The Underbelly series of true crime compendia ran to 11 volumes. The series had a number of break-out titles: Tough (2002), an omnibus of selections from the series; Rats (2006), about unsolved crimes; Gotcha (2005), which dealt with hits and arrests; and the stand-out hit, Leadbelly. The latter focused on Melbourne’s so-called “gangland war”, a linked series of murders that became entwined with a conflict over control of the increasingly lucrative market for “party drugs”. These books pitched themselves well, and they have been very successful. Priced between $20 and $25 in paperback, and engagingly-written, they are prominent in airport bookshops, department store book sections, large chains like Angus and Robertson, as well as specialist bookstores (see Figure 3).
Underbelly 1 and Rule and Silvester’s Leadbelly dealt with the same series of events, although the television version projected a different tone and foregrounded different preoccupations, as we will see. Both trace a war that is sparked by Alphonse Gangitano’s execution of Greg Workman (Gangitano is played by Vince Colosimo, the promotional face of the show) and starts in earnest with the non-fatal shooting of Carl Williams (Gyton Grantley) by Jason and Mark Moran (Les Hill and Callan Mulvey). The tit-for-tat murders that follow are between Carl’s allies on one side, and the Moran family and the so-called “Carlton Crew” of inner-city gangsters on the other. On television, the story was complicated by a range of subplots that developed particularly in relation to the sexual appetites of the main protagonists and the compelling portrayal of Carl Williams’ wife Roberta (Kat Stewart), Underbelly’s answer to Lady Macbeth. Along with sex, the television programme offered greater character development to exploit the formidable ensemble cast. It also made the perspectives of police (and presumably, the wider community) more central, with a voice-over narration by female Detective Jacqui James (Caroline Craig). This commentary had a markedly different tone to the authorial voice of the Underbelly books, and as such it was a crucial feminizing gesture to ensure the show’s prospects for mainstream success.
As is often the case with true crime, Underbelly’s first season hit snags because of its interactions with the real-life events it drew on. In February 2008, Justice Betty King banned the screening of Underbelly in Victoria, much to the Nine Network’s chagrin, ruling that it might prejudice then-current trials (AAPa 2008; Bartlett 2008; Bradley 2008; Butcher 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d; Ziffer 2008). Later, Roberta Williams parlayed the show into an extension of her own celebrity through a number of money-making opportunities (AAPb 2008; Battersby 2008a; Royall 2008). Merchandise and support groups were set up through online social media platforms – consolidating the status of the Williams brand [Figure 4]. Community groups vocally objected to this use of the series to capitalize on an earlier life of crime (Houlihan 2008; Benns 2008), particularly since a range of media outlets aside from Nine assisted the efforts of Williams and others in the wake of Underbelly’s popularity. In a touch of irony, with screening issues preventing legitimate access to the programme in Victoria, this major initiative in true crime television came to circulate via criminal networks selling knock-off copies as well as illegal internet download sites (Jackson 2008; Holroyd 2008;Weekes 2008).
Figure 4. Unofficial Underbelly fan merchandise for sale on E-Bay in 2008
This bleed between reality and fiction, criminality, consumption and celebrity was exacerbated on a number of levels. The real-life personae of Underbelly characters became regular features of mainstream media interviews, especially through the infotainment platforms of current affairs. Today Tonight and A Current Affair maintained regular updates of Roberta Williams and Judy Moran, while The Australian Magazine did the same for suspected killer Mick Gatto (Stewart 2008). Roberta Williams attracted still more fame by updating her former husband’s Facebook account (Bradford 2008; Battersby 2008b) and launching a “tell-all” autobiography (Williams 2009).
The 2009 release of I, Mick Gatto, by Melbourne University Publishing, crystallized the increasingly complex economy of infamy developing around Underbelly. Clearly seeking to cash in on a mass-audience, the press came under attack from a range of quarters. Alan Kohler, chairman of the publisher’s board, and also ABC television’s finance reporter, was moved to apologise to subscribers of his weekly newsletter, The Eureka Report: “if seeing me launch Mick Gatto’s memoirs upset you, I sincerely apologise. I can assure you it does not mean Eureka Report has any less integrity or that I am going soft on crime. It was just a book launch”.
Noting the disapproval he had endured from friends and family, including from his wife, Kohler couldn’t resist forwarding an account of the launch as part of his apologyto subscribers. The email conveyed an almost schoolboy excitement at the celebrity underworld amassed by the event:
We launched Mick’s book today – it was a big success and certainly the rummest crowd we’ve ever had at a book launch. When I arrived the crowd stretched down Bourke Street past a deeply disturbed Hill of Content like a big scene from The Sopranos. There were men giving each other stubble rash with all the kissing, many dark glasses and black shirts, some toupes, quite a bit of collagen and botox on the ladies, I think. It was, in short, a magnificently colourful event, very well attended by the cream of Melbourne’s underworld and other glitterati.
Taken from a report sent to the publisher’s board of directors, and circulated to a group of clients paying Kohler for financial advice, the tone of the email is symptomatic of the wider cultural fixation on criminal underworld economies that were proving lucrative for many more ostensibly legitimate businesses.[3]
The casting choices of Season One and Two assisted in the confusion of ordinary celebrity and infamy. Most of the key roles were played by well-known actors from previous TV appearances. For instance, Lewis Moran was played by Kevin Harrington, who built his reputation playing both David Bishop (son to Harold Bishop) on Neighbours and the archetypal “Howard Battler”/ “ordinary Australian” Kevin on the popular ABC drama Seachange.[4] Harrington’s other major roles include local films The Dish (Sitch, 2000), Australian Rules (Goldman, 2002) and The Honourable Wally Norman (Emery, 2003). This is just one illustration of the major conflict between the “characters” played by actors and the history of associations accumulated in the CVs they brought to the project. Underbelly’s large ensemble cast included long-serving veterans of iconic “family” programmes such as Home and Away, Neighbours, Blue Heelers and The Secret Life of Us.[5] In this way, Underbelly can be read as the flipside to the televisual mainstream of the period it claims to represent; a counter-narrative to the televisual memory provided by peak shows of the preceding decade, whether in mainstream family fare or next generation youth programming. This accumulated viewing knowledge heightened sensitivity to questions of corruption at the heart of the show, given the public’s parochial susceptibility to bestow innocence and venerability to these faces.
In Season Two, Italian-Australian criminal Robert Trimbole, played by Roy Billing, was an oddly sympathetic character, humanised by a devoted love interest and a particularly inconvenient case of prostate cancer. Trimbole faced regular racism from business partners in pivotal moments of the story, which drew attention to the strength of the Italian business empire in place at the beginning of Underbelly 1.[6] Trimbole’s “gift of the gab” assures his success as an entrepreneur and his deft subversion of bureaucratic process. His “people skills” ultimately provide the basis for his escape from Australia – and this life – without punishment for a series of arranged murders. Trimbole’s manipulation of official systems mark him as a characteristically Australian battler against authority, in a tradition of larrikin criminals stretching as far back as Ned Kelly. In many ways, this is only fitting for an actor known for playing the unremarkable everyman.