The papers were full of it today, but didn’t carry a word of it. Desmond “Tuppence” Moran the soft-hearted, hardened criminal with the nickname from Mary Poppins was “a 60-year-old bachelor with no children”. He shared his million dollar house and his large Mercedes car with a younger male companion and once “bitch-slapped” a sworn enemy whom he described as “an in-bred albino c-nt”.

Dessy was said to have behaved like a “bloody drama queen” last time someone took a pot shot at him on St Patrick’s Day. Whoever hated the last of the Moran clan with such a passion that he would make two attempts on his life within three months wasn’t thinking of a staring role in Underbelly Six. This was more like The Long Good Friday, the 1980 film staring Bob Hoskins which was loosely based on the real life Kray Brothers (Ronnie and Reggie) — a pair of psychopathic East End gangsters who terrorised and pulverised London in the Swinging Sixties.

Ronnie Kray shot and killed “S’arf” London gangster George Cornell at the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Road on 9 March 1966 because, at a 1965 Christmas function at the Krays’ Astor Club, Cornell referred disparagingly to Ronnie Kray as a “fat poof”: Which he was.

Adelaide’s Advertiser struggle to avoid the Underbelly cliche…

The Age’s millionaire wordsmith John “Sly” Silvester burst into print on the stroke of midnight with his usual jaundiced assessment of the end of the Moran era. But he was well shaded by colleague Jo Chandler who waxed lyrical about “the noxious bile of the underworld bubbles to the surface and explodes in the middle of a suburban shopping strip”.

Patrick Carlyon in the Herald Sun opined Melburnians were returning to “a parallel universe of amorality and violence”. The tabloid is expected to lift its game somewhat sometime today when heavyweights Geoff Wilkinson and Keith Moor get onto the case. For the record; this is contemporary Melbourne’s 27th (The Australian) 29th (Herald Sun) and 30th (The Age) gangland slaying since Alphonse Gangitano kicked off the involuntary dying game.

The real parallel universe in this capper is how Sydney has attempted to totally usurp Melbourne’s leading role in death and destruction business in recent times. Channel Nine announced this week that Underbelly Three: The Golden Mile will be Sydney-based and Sydney-centric.

In the professional opinion of the Kooka Brothers, the Sydney crime scene is extraordinarily limp wrested; where the coward’s knife and the ubiquitous drive-by shooting has replaced the manly Melbourne art form of the bullet to the head at close range.

Call us old fashioned, but we fail to see the point in emptying a whole clip into Fadi Ibrahim’s Lamborghini in an ambush outside his high-security Castle Cove home recently if the object of the exercise is to kill him and not just make his brothers really angry.

Maybe MTC.