Police are unlikely to ever unravel his drug fortune, hidden through a network of business and investment that includes coal and oil companies, brothels, property and even high-end fashion labels.

Like a lot of crooks, Mokbel began with small cannabis deals before moving into speed and finally driving the ecstasy explosion that dominated the club scene a decade ago.

Mokbel's crew - from the northern suburbs - began dealing cannabis in the early 1990s, meeting at Mokbel's mother's house in Canberra St, Brunswick.

Tony and his brother Horty were the first to branch out into speed, a grubby drug that Tony initially tried to keep his brother out of.



The Grove Cafe in Coburg was another haunt, where deals were done and the brothers discussed the ever-shifting loyalties of competing crime families like the Williams and the Morans.

By the mid-1990s Mokbel had gone from failed restaurateur to multimillionaire, owning racehorses, farms and luxury cars.

He was already thumbing his nose at authorities, according to associates, giving horses names like Frosty The Snowman and My Cook - slang terms in the drug trade. He owned at least seven horses, but none in his own name.

Mokbel had always loved the track. In the 1980s and early '90s he headed a group of punters, who ripped a fortune from bookies and became known as the Tracksuit Gang.

While punting and drugs delivered him a fortune, Mokbel once knew the value of a hard day's work.

Arriving with his family from Lebanon as a child, he grew up around Coburg and Brunswick and did whatever job he could find - waiter, dishwasher, security.

He was barely out of his teens when he and his wife Carmel bought their first business, a milk bar that saw them putting in long hours, every day of the week.

Later ventures included restaurants and cafes, including T Jays in Sydney Rd.

As his drug empire boomed, Mokbel took cover as a budding entrepreneur and property developer.

His biggest project was redeveloping the Brunswick market site into upmarket apartments and shops. It never came to fruition.

By the time he fled to Greece, Fat Tony faced charges over seven different drug operations.

But it was the death of Lewis Moran that threatened to cause Mokbel most grief.

When he was finally captured and returned to Melbourne, police felt they had strong enough evidence to charge him with the murder of Moran at the Brunswick Club in 2004 as well as small time drug dealer Michael Marshall a year earlier.

Things had started to turn sour for Mokbel a couple of years earlier when one one of his contacts turned police informer and began taping him and Carl Williams.

The sting that saw him arrested was Victoria's biggest at the time, a joint state and federal operation.

He sat in jail awaiting court hearings for month after month, but his time in Port Phillip Prison's Swallow unit wasn't wasted.

He became close to Williams and his trusted offsider, a killer turned informer later dubbed Mr A.

They ate meals together, and Mr A, who worked in the prison kitchen, would smuggle extra nosh to Mokbel, later telling police: "He loved his food."

Mr A said Mokbel was trying to have an informer killed, but complained that he couldn't reach him because he was in protective custody.

After their release on bail Mokbel and Williams met regularly, often at a Red Rooster outlet with police watching from a distance.

As Williams honed his plans for wiping out the Moran family, Mokbel offered his support, passing on news of Jason Moran's whereabouts when he had it.

Jason Moran was shot dead in 2003 by Mr A, and the murders continued with the death of a small-time dealer Willie Thompson.

Williams had also organised the hit, unaware that Thompson was a childhood friend of Mokbel.

Thompson's death angered Mokbel, who mistakenly believed Michael Marshall was the shooter.

Mr A told police Mokbel offered him and Williams $300,000 to kill Marshall.

"Tony confirmed to me that he believed Michael Marshall was responsible for Willie's death and he wanted him dead," Mr A said.

Mokbel had made no secret of his dislike for another big man of Melbourne's underbelly, Mick Gatto.

He even met Purana taskforce detectives after Gatto's 2004 arrest for the shooting of Andrew "Benji" Veniamin, telling them Gatto was a "c---sucker".

"I don't invite you to my place where I feel comfortable and pop ya," he said of Veniamin's death.

Gatto was acquitted by a jury after pleading self-defence.

Mokbel said Gatto had arranged for him to meet a gang of bikies in 2002 but the conversation went a little out of control and he was badly beaten. Gatto stood by and did nothing to help.

"Things didn't go too good. I was lucky in the end," Mokbel told police.

When Moran, a member of Gatto's Carlton Crew, was killed, police believed Mokbel and Williams had a shared interest in his death.

Williams had wanted all the Morans dead, and Mokbel had considered a strike against Moran a strike against his enemy, Gatto.

Their theory was buoyed by telephone intercepts of calls between Mokbel and Roberta Willliams, who called him to gloat over Moran's death in the hour after his public execution.

"They would have been laughing at us," she said of the Carlton Crew, referring to the shooting of her close friend Veniamin. Mokbel replied: "That's right, there's a god up there."

Carl Williams, who later pleaded guilty to the Moran murder, waited four minutes after hearing of Moran's demise to ring Mokbel.

Jurors in Mokbel's secret murder trial would later reject claims by the getaway driver that Mokbel himself paid for the hit.

Mokbel, the driver said, handed him $140,000 in a car park after the killing, $10,000 shy of the promised reward.

But they got a rare insight into the world in which Williams and Mokbel lived, hearing intercepted conversations where Williams - a man who stumbled over words like "pursuant" - would rant about his favourite topics, such as his ban from Crown casino.

So incensed was Williams by the ban that he would try to call then police commissioner Christine Nixon to complain.

Prosecutors eventually decided to drop Mokbel's murder charge, along with the charges over the drug bust that had originally brought Mokbel down.

In the Supreme Court this Monday Mokbel admitted his guilt to trafficking a large commercial quantity of methylamphetamine between July 2006 and June 2007.

He also admitted trafficking a large commercial quantity of ecstasy between February and August 2005.

Mokbel pleaded guilty to a further charge of urging an undercover officer to commit the offence of importing ecstasy into Australia.

The court heard all other matters against Mokbel will be discontinued.

All that is required to close the book on one of Melbourne's most colourful underworld characters is a jail sentence.