WHERE MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA WHEN 30 JULY 2023
ACCORDING TO UNDERWORLD SOURCES, THIS WAS A BOTCHED JOB. SOMETHING MUCH, MUCH WORSE HAD BEEN PLANNED
"I ’ve never seen anything of this nature,” said Victoria Police’s Detective Inspector Graham Banks, speaking shortly after a bizarre break-in at Melbourne’s Preston General Cemetery. “It’s a new low, that’s for sure.”
© Victoria Police
At about 4am on 30 July 2023, two men wearing gas masks broke into the cemetery’s enormous mausoleum (the largest mausoleum in the southern hemisphere, in fact) and removed the casket containing the remains of Meshilin Marrogi. They dragged the casket some distance through the building before their progress was foiled by a broken lift. Unable to remove the casket from the building, they instead smashed it open and stole a diamond ring from the corpse.
And this was no ordinary grave robbery. Had the thieves’ intentions been to simply steal jewellery, then they wouldn’t have dragged the casket such a long distance from its crypt. It seems that the diamond ring was a mere ‘consolation prize’, and that the plan really had been to steal the entire casket and the remains inside it. The question is, why? And that’s where this case gets really sinister.
Meshilin Marrogi was the sister of one of Australia’s most notorious criminals, George Marrogi, and a prominent figure among her family and wider community. She died of COVID-19 in 2021 at only 30 years old. At the time her brother was in prison awaiting sentencing for the 2016 murder of Kadir Ors. He was unable to attend her funeral, but has continued directing the operations of his drug empire, the NCF (Notorious Crime Family) from behind bars. Some say Meshilin was not involved in the NCF’s activities, while others say she was the brains behind the operation. Either way, she was very close to her brother. And her brother has a lot of enemies.
One such enemy is Kazem ‘Kaz’ Hamad. Shortly prior to the desecration of Meshilin’s grave, Hamad had been released from prison in Australia and deported to Dubai. Since then the “tobacco wars” have escalated dramatically in Melbourne and across the state of Victoria. The second half of 2023 saw an explosion in violent crime among Middle Eastern gangs trading in drugs and illicit tobacco, and so, in October, Victoria Police set up Taskforce Lunar (headed up by the aforementioned D.I. Banks) to tackle the problem.
