The last of the Williams crime family is gone with the death of the drug-trafficking father of murderer Carl Williams.
Patriarch George, 69, might have looked like a quiet, bespectacled father but those who knew him say he was an equal player in Melbourne's deadly gangland wars along with his mass murdering son.
Despite Carl's crimes - which included ordering the execution of gangster Jason Moran in front of his kids at a footy clinic - George always stood up for him.
"You might say he was mixed up in the gangland wars and them kids had fathers," George told 3AW in 2012.
"But most of the gangland wars was for protection of his life and his family. I'm not saying all of it."
A convicted drug trafficker himself, George quietly retired from the underworld in 2015.
Long-time Melbourne crime writer John Silvester said George was Carl's silent partner throughout the underworld war and "very lucky" not to have been charged with murder.
"George's car was used in at least one of the hits," Mr Silvester told 3AW radio on Thursday.
George was on life support in hospital, surrounded by relatives, when he died of a heart attack overnight, News Corp Australia reports.
He was the last of the four members of the Williams clan.
His ex-wife Barbara died of a suspected deliberate drug overdose in 2008, his oldest son Shane died of a heroin overdose in 1997 and Carl was bludgeoned to death in Barwon Prison in 2010.
George was sentenced in November 2007 to four-and-a-half years jail for trafficking amphetamines.
He and Carl turned over a minimum of $500,000 when they ran drugs together from late 2002 to mid-2004, a Melbourne court heard at the time.
George went to jail with Carl, who was in for the murder of Michael Marshall. Carl was also later sentenced to 35 years for the murders of Lewis and Jason Moran and Mark Mallia.
But fellow inmate Matthew Johnson killed him with the stem of an exercise bike in their shared maximum security unit in Barwon Prison.
Carl's murder came after reports he'd made a deal to co-operate with police for reduced jail time for his dad, a settlement of George's massive tax bill and payment of his daughter's school fees.
George was released on parole in June 2009.
Despite his retirement from the underworld, shots were fired into his Broadmeadows home in July 2015, with no one injured.
Later that month Carl's teenage daughter Dhakota Williams won a confidential sum of compensation from the Victorian government over her father's "preventable" murder at Barwon's maximum-security Acacia unit.
George settled his unpaid tax matter with the Australian Taxation Office in 2013 before it went to trial.
Former gangland rival Mick Gatto, who was acquitted of the 2005 murder of gangland hit-man Andrew "Benji" Veniamin on the grounds of self-defence, on Thursday told AAP he wouldn't be commenting "on the events of the past 24 hours".
Veniamin was believed to be a hit-man for the Williams family.
Broadmeadows funeral directors Tobin Brothers, who organised Carl's funeral, has been engaged to lay George to rest.
Likely to be at the funeral is Carl's ex-wife, Roberta Williams, and her daughter Danielle Stephens, who was charged over a 2014 shooting - although the proceedings were later dropped.
In January, Roberta announced she had become a grandmother with Danielle giving birth to a daughter with partner Sanar Ghanim, who was jailed over the shooting 2014.
