The Price of a Gangland hit

What's a life worth? In Melbourne's gangland war the going rate is $150,000.

That's what fugitive drug boss Antonios "Fat Tony" Mokbel and another unnamed man agreed to pay to have crime patriarch Lewis Moran murdered, according to a Victorian Supreme Court judge.

That's also what slain underworld figure Mario Condello was said to have offered a police informer known only as 166 to carry out each of three hits on gangland rivals.

Keith George Faure, who organised the hit on Lewis Moran in a Brunswick club in March 2004, and two others were eventually paid only $140,000 for the murder. The $10,000 shortfall was a matter that Faure "proposed to resolve later".

Faure was sentenced to a minimum of 19 years in jail in the Supreme Court yesterday for the Moran hit and the murder of a rival underworld gunman Lewis Caine six weeks later. Caine had links to Condello's side in the gangland war.

Faure's jail term was reduced in return for him agreeing to provide Victoria Police's Purana gangland task force with information about a number of underworld cases.

According to Gotcha's sources, the prices reportedly paid for hits during Melbourne's bloody underworld war rose steadily as the number of hitmen diminished through payback killings. The shortage of people willing to murder for money became so acute that Condello allegedly tried to recruit a hitman from rural Victoria.

The hitman was told that there were "no good men" left in Melbourne because of the war.

But the move was Condello's undoing. The man he allegedly tried to recruit was already working as an Australian Crime Commission informer.

Condello became a victim of an unknown hitman in February, on the eve of his trial, when he was gunned down outside his Brighton home. Mokbel, who helped bankroll the Moran hit, hasn't been seen since skipping bail on March 20 during his trial on cocaine smuggling charges.

Mokbel, who is rumoured to be in Lebanon living on $20 million he moved out of the country, was sentenced to nine years jail in his absence. Purana detectives are understood to be looking at his possible links to a number of gangland murders.