2000: Melbourne Gangland War: Dino Dibra Ambushed and Shot Dead Outside His Own Home

Dino Dibra, 25, was one of the early casualties of Melbourne‘s gangland war. He was gunned down on this day the moment he stepped outside his home in Sunshine West, hit multiple times in what police believed was a professional, pre-planned hit rather than a chance confrontation.

Investigators were confident a hired shooter had been waiting for him, and suspicion quickly fell on Andrew Veniamin, a figure who would go on to be linked to several more killings as the underworld conflict spread across the city. Dibra’s murder became one of the opening chapters in a decade-long cycle of tit-for-tat violence that would eventually claim more than thirty lives.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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1999: The Shooting at Gladstone Park That Lit the Fuse on the Melbourne Gangland War

Carl Williams was 29 and already dealing drugs when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach on this day at Gladstone Park, in Melbourne, over an $80,000 debt tied to a failed amphetamine batch. Jason and his brother Mark Moran were both present. Williams survived.

He did not forget it. The shooting became the spark for a bloody tit-for-tat campaign that grew into the Melbourne gangland war, a decade of killings across the city’s underworld that would eventually claim both Moran brothers among dozens of others, and send Williams himself to prison before his own murder behind bars.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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1923: Squizzy Taylor Walked Free While a Man Who Never Fired a Shot Hanged for a Melbourne Bank Murder

Thomas Berriman, manager of the Hawthorn branch of the Commercial Bank, was shot outside Glenferrie Station in Melbourne on this date while carrying £1,851 in bank funds to the head office. He died from the wound two weeks later.

Angus Murray was hanged for the killing, convicted as a principal even though it was his companion who actually pulled the trigger. Underworld figure Squizzy Taylor, swept up as the robbery’s alleged organiser, escaped a murder charge, convicted only of occupying a house frequented by thieves and serving six months.

The actual gunman, Richard Buckley, vanished for almost seven years before detectives traced him, bearded and living quietly, to a house in Moonee Ponds. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1946, dying and in his eighties, he was released to spend his final days at home.

Commercial Bank branch where manager T R V Berriman was shot: 1923
Commercial Bank branch where manager T R V Berriman was shot: 1923

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1866: America’s First Train Robbery: the Reno Gang Strikes Near Seymour, Indiana

On the night of October 6, 1866, three members of the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train as it pulled out of Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the express guard and cracked open a safe holding roughly 16,000 dollars. They then shoved a second, heavier safe off the moving train for the rest of the gang to finish the job, but could not break it open before a posse closed in and they fled. It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first train robbery in American history.

The job, pulled off by brothers Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno, became the blueprint for a wave of copycat train robberies across the Midwest. Within two years the brothers paid for it dearly: dragged from jail cells by masked vigilantes and hanged, most of the gang’s stolen fortune never recovered.

Portrait of the Reno Brothers members of the Reno Gang train robbers
Portrait of the Reno Brothers members of the Reno Gang train robbers

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On This Day in True Crime History
1841·First Blood on the Gallows: Two Men Hanged at the New Darlinghurst Gaol
1857·Newly Freed, Then Shot by His Employer: A Convict Hanged in Perth for Attempted Murder
1880·Ned Kelly Sentenced to Hang in Melbourne
1907·He Knew Where She Kept Her Money, But Killed Her Instead: Hanged in Sydney for the Murder of a Widow
1927·Squizzy Taylor Buried in Melbourne as a Morbid Crowd Forces Police to Intervene
More Crime On This Day →

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