The scene of the murder of Vincenzo Muratore, who was gunned down outside his Hampton, Victoria home in 1962. His son Alfonso suffered a similar fate in 1992. Picture: Library Nwn Source: News Limited
It was the death of long-term Melbourne criminal Godfather Domenico "The Pope" Italiano in 1962 that sparked a chain of events that helped confirm the presence of the Calabrian mafia in Australia.
When Italiano and his enforcer Antonio "The Toad" Barbara died within weeks of each other - both of natural causes - a vacuum was created at the top of the secret society.
Calabrian-born Melbourne mobsters Vincenzo Angilletta and Vincenzo Muratore died during the power struggle to fill the void. Their deaths in 1963 and 1964 became known as the Victoria Market murders.
Victoria Market stallholder Liborio Benvenuto eventually won the bloody battle to take over as Godfather of Melbourne's Calabrian Mafia - a position Benvenuto held until his death in 1988, also from natural causes.
Police intelligence records from 1965 rated Benvenuto as about the fourth most senior member of the Calabrian Mafia in Australia.
TOMORROW: How authorities are tackling the Calabrian mafia - Part Three of Keith Moor's investigation
Investigations by Victoria Police, assisted by mafia experts from the United States and Italy, into the Victoria Market murders and related shootings confirmed the long-held suspicions of a few detectives that the Calabrian mafia was well established in Australia - particularly in Melbourne.
The spate of shootings connected to the Victoria Market prompted the Victorian Government to invite two overseas experts on Italian organised crime to assist Victoria Police.
They were John T. Cusack, a district supervisor of the United States' Bureau of Narcotics, and Dr Ugo Macera, an assistant commissioner of police in Calabria.
The Herald Sun has seen copies of the Cusack and Macera reports, neither of which were ever made public.
The gravesite of Liborio Benvenuto, at the Springvale Botanical Cemetery. Liborio has rested there since 1988. Source: News Limited
Cusack's report paints a disturbing picture of the Calabrian mafia's hold over the Victoria Market in particular - and Victoria in general.
"I have reviewed voluminous files, interviewed several reliable informants and participated in the interrogation of suspects involved as well as defendants charged in these crimes," Mr Cusack wrote.
"On the basis of this, I should now like to set forth the following observations, conclusions and recommendations:
"There is an Italian Secret Society operating in Melbourne and the State of Victoria. It exists also in New South Wales and South Australia, and, apparently to a lesser extent, in Queensland and Western Australia.
"It is frequently referred to by its adherents as the Society. Some, particularly outsiders, call it mafia. Actually it is not mafia. The latter is exclusively Sicilian in origin and membership. "Since the Society in Australia is exclusively Calabrian, it is obviously a derivation of the ancient Calabrian Secret Criminal Society known as the L'Onorata Societa (The Honoured Society), `Ndrangheta (Calabrian dialect for The Honoured Society), also referred to by some as Fibia.
PART ONE: How powerful empire was exposed.
"The Society allegedly numbers at least 300 members in Victoria, 200 alone in the Melbourne area. The remainder are scattered throughout the State, with large segments in the fruit growing and farming areas of Mildura and Shepparton.
"There are reports the Society has existed in Victoria since 1930. It manifested itself in Queensland between 1928 and 1940 in a reign of terror conducted to extort funds from sugar cane growers. During that period, 10 homicides and 30 bombings were attributed to the Society in victimising fellow Calabrians who resisted their standover tactics.
"Resistance to their demands for tribute and protection money first met with threats and then water pollution, stock poisoning and cane burning - all ancient and traditional Society tactics in Calabria and Sicily. If resistance continued, homes would be bombed and, if necessary, this was followed by woundings or murder via the knife, shotgun, or sniper's bullet.
"The Calabrian L'Onorata Societa is well entrenched in Australia. It is already engaged in extortion, prostitution, counterfeiting, sly grog, breaking and entering, illegal gambling and the smuggling of aliens and small arms. Its infiltration and effort to dominate and control the fruit and vegetable produce business has been exposed.
"Within the next 25 years, if unchecked, the Society is capable of diversification into all facets of organised crime and legitimate business. This could very well include narcotics, organised gambling, including the corruption of racing, football, etc.
"The Calabrian criminal element that constitutes the Society in Melbourne, and other areas of Australia, is composed of shrewd, hardened criminals with extensive records in Calabria or Australia, or both, for commercial crimes and violence.
1970s. Liborio Benvenuto (right), a Melbourne mafia godfather. Picture: Photo File Source: News Limited
"Significantly, they are from the villages in Calabria mentioned in most books on the subject as the strongholds of the L'Onorata Societa such as Gioia Tauro, Delianova. Sinopoli, Seminara, Santa Cristina D'Aspromonte, Verapodio, Scido, Plati and Oppido Marmotina.
"Within the next 25 years their large cash resources and strongarm tactics will eventually enable them to develop monopolies and large profit in such fields as labour racketeering, wholesale distribution of alcoholic and soft drinks, the importation of olive oil, tomato paste and cheese, the baking and distribution of Italian baked goods, the vending machine business, the monopolistic ownership of night clubs and taverns, musical recording and record distributing companies, model and theatrical booking agencies and building and road construction companies."
The latest intelligence holdings of various Australian law enforcement agencies reveal the Calabrian mafia did indeed get into almost all of the areas predicted by Cusack - plus a few he hadn't considered.
The Cusack report also revealed an important method of the Calabrian mafia was to cultivate important people and place its own people in positions where they could be of use - such as politics, passport offices, police forces and other government departments.
History again proved Cusack right, with law enforcement agencies across the country recording many examples of the Calabrian mafia placing members in positions of power and corrupting officials.
"In order to further their legitimate endeavours and cloak their illicit operations, Society members conduct a well-planned program of ingratiating themselves with people of all walks of life," Cusack's 1964 report said.
"This calls for interest and activity in community and church affairs, including generous contributions to charities. They lead an ostensibly quiet and respectable family life and are ever ready to entertain and do favours for the right people."
Cusack revealed the Victoria Police Special Branch swooped on a house in Osbourne St, Brunswick, on September 21, 1957, after discovering a Calabrian mafia meeting attended by some of its most senior figures.
Special Branch officers stopped and searched dozens of men as they left the house. A total of 32 were arrested and 22 were charged with being idle and disorderly and carrying weapons, including pistols and knives. All claimed they were at the house to attend a birthday party for the homeowner's child - despite the fact the man's wife and children had been sent away.
Police later discovered one of the items on the agenda of the Brunswick meeting was to decide what punishment should be meted out on one of its members.
Some of those at the Brunswick meeting were members of a family that runs a prominent and legitimate business in Melbourne to this day - a business that Calabrian mafia members still use.
The Macera report, which, like the Cusack report, has never been made public, confirmed Cusack's finding that the Calabrian mafia was well-established at the Victoria Market by the early 1960s, but didn't consider the organisation as big a threat as Cusack claimed.
Macera said he was told Vincenzo Angilletta tried to take over as Godfather after Domenico Italiano died and that Vincenzo Muratore called a secret meeting in 1963 to discuss Angilletta's attempt to take over from Italiano. The meeting was held in a secluded room at the Bonanza Bar in Union Rd, Ascot Vale, where it was decided Angilletta would be executed.
According to Victoria Police intelligence, one of those present at the Bonanza Bar meeting was one of the top three Calabrian mafia bosses in Victoria by the mid-1990s. He is still alive today and is a man of great power in the Calabrian mafia.
1964. Vincent Muratore's grave (No.1) next to the grave of Domenico Italiano (No.2). Picture: Photo File Source: Supplied
Macera said many victims of the Calabrian mafia endured the stand-over tactics because they were too scared to complain to authorities.
"They all hide behind absolute silence and prefer to endure the imposition of the organisation, rather than reporting to the police, for fear of reprisals," the Macera report said.
"Vincenzo Angilletta's murder is the classic example of a killing decided by mafia, whether interpreted as a struggle for supremacy or as a punishment against someone who did not obey the bosses orders."
The Cusack and Macera reports were never made public, but were presented to State and Federal Governments.
Their conclusions prompted the Federal Government to order its own wideranging investigation into Italian organised crime in Australia.
In November 1964, respected ASIO agent Colin Brown was appointed to head the inquiry and was seconded to the Commonwealth Attorney-General's department to run it.
Brown was instructed to conduct a nationwide intelligence survey and to submit a report on his findings to the Attorney-General and the Commissioner of the Commonwealth Police (the forerunner to the Australian Federal Police).
The ASIO agent based himself in Melbourne, it being the recognised hotspot of Calabrian mafia activity. Brown visited all Australian states and spent time in Mildura, which had a powerful Calabrian mafia cell.
Many powerful agencies were ordered to give Brown whatever documents and other information he wanted. They included every state and territory police force, the Special Branch in each state, Commonwealth Police, ASIO, the Departments of Immigration, Customs and Taxation and the Stevedoring Industry Commission. He was also assisted by various police forces and other agencies in Italy.
TOMORROW: How authorities are tackling the Calabrian mafia - Part Three of Keith Moor's investigation
Brown's conclusions, which were handed to the Commonwealth Attorney-General and the Director-General of ASIO in late 1965, mirrored those of Cusack - namely that Calabrian mafia cells were flourishing in Australia and that each had a similar code of conduct which was strictly enforced by the hierarchy and which was clearly understood by each recruit who took the oath of allegiance.
Brown used a document seized by police from the home of a prominent Melbourne Calabrian mafia member in 1964, which listed the secret society's rules, initiation rituals and how to form a Calabrian mafia branch, to illustrate the importance of members remaining silent about its activities, particularly if it was police asking the questions.
The document said: "Let us love each other, let us love each other, Comrades in knives, Comrades in misfortune, just as our three knights of Spain loved each other when Sicily, Calabria and the entire Neopolitan state was like a great ball tossed around the world - a hot-blooded nation, yet, in turn, cold as ice and strong as iron, yet humble and soft as silk. In that great ball there was a vase which contained flowers. Let each of us carry a flower in his mouth and woe to him who lets that flower drop from his mouth. He will be punished and dealt with within the Society in blood and with words to humble him. Thus shall this honourable Society be formed."
Students of Calabrian history interpreted this passage as meaning a strict adherence to the code of omerta had to be established as the first essential step in forming a Calabrian mafia cell.
ASIO agent Brown's 1965 report, which was headed "The Italian Criminal Society in Australia", was never made public.
The Herald Sun has seen a copy of the 146-page report. It takes a more Australia-wide view of the Calabrian mafia than the Cusack and Macera reports.
Brown found that children born into families associated with the Calabrian mafia will almost certainly be raised in the traditions of the secret society.
"Secrecy and allegiance to the organisation is increasingly ensured by the intermarriage of families within it," Brown wrote.
Vincenzo Angilletta, who was shot dead at Fairfield on April 4, 1963. Picture: Photo File Source: News Limited
"Females are not admitted to membership of the organisations and generally know little about them. When a meeting is to be held at the home of one member, his wife and family are sent away. In accordance with standard behaviour, a wife does not question her husband's activities.
"New members go through an initiation ceremony, the rituals of which vary."
Brown said the earliest indication of the Calabrian mafia setting up cells in Australia was with the arrival of the ship Re D'Italia in 1922. He said the ship carried three known Calabrian mafia members who established cells in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. He named these first three Australian Calabrian mafia bosses, but the Perth boss is still alive and unable to be named for legal reasons.
The other two were Domenico Strano (Sydney) and Antonio "The Toad" Barbara (Melbourne). Strano settled in Sydney and the respect he demanded was evident at his funeral in 1965. Police secretly watched as almost all known members of Sydney's Calabrian mafia community mourned at Strano's elaborate funeral. Interstate Godfather's also attended.
Barbara was 21 when he arrived in Melbourne, but was already well schooled in the `Ndrangheta. His father Domenico was an influential member in Calabria.
Barbara got off the boat in Adelaide, but soon moved to Melbourne. He teamed up with Domenico Italiano, who arrived in Melbourne in 1930. They ended up running the most dominant Calabrian mafia cell in Melbourne, with Italiano as the Godfather and Barbara as his enforcer and deputy.
Part 1: How a mobster's death unmasked the Australian arm of a powerful empire.
Once the flurry of media reports about the market murders died down, the Cusack, Macera and Brown reports were filed away - and the Calabrian mafia started going about its business again.
Yet the Cusack, Macera and Brown reports proved spot on.
Their recommendations were largely ignored and their predictions came true. Just as they had warned, the Calabrian mafia in Australia did diversify into drugs and other organised crime and invested heavily in legitimate businesses to launder its ill-gotten gains.
The spotlight again fell on the Calabrian mafia in 1977 - and again it was murder which brought it to national prominence.
This time it was the execution of prominent anti-drugs crusader and budding politician Donald Mackay in Griffith in southern NSW - centre of the marijuana industry - that shocked Australians.
The outcry following what was Australia's first political assassination, largely led by Mackay's widow Barbara, resulted in the Woodward Royal Commission.
Woodward confirmed John Cusack's 1964 warning: the Calabrian mafia was entrenched in Australia.
Commissioner Woodward's senior assisting counsel, Bill Fisher, QC, said the Calabrian Honoured Society organised and co-ordinated much of Australian's marijuana industry and described it as "a closely organised and secretive organisation based on tribal or clannish loyalties".
Soon after he was elected in 1982, Victoria's Police Minister Race Mathews asked officers to provide him with an update on John Cusack's findings.
Mr Mathews was told by detectives from the Victoria Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI) that Cusack's predictions had largely come true and that tackling the Calabrian mafia was beyond the means of Victoria Police.
The Minister was told that in the 18 years since Cusack's warning, the Calabrian mafia had become established in many legitimate businesses as a means of laundering its ill-gotten gains. These included horse racing and harness racing, pinball machines, the wine industry, import firms, furniture manufacturing and sales, travel agencies and building construction.
"Although the existence of the Society is understood, relatively quick and effective countermeasures are beyond the present capacity of the Victoria Bureau of Criminal Intelligence," the minister was told in a document seen by the Herald Sun.
"The Bureau is insufficiently resourced and too narrowly structured to be able, with certainty, to counteract the Society.
Francesco Benvenuto, who was found shot in his car at Beaumaris. Picture: Supplied Source: News Limited
"A present estimate of the matters covered in the Cusack report is that the economic and social strength of the secret Italian criminal society has grown markedly during the 18 years that has elapsed since Mr Cusack reported."
Police knowledge of the Calabrian mafia's affairs was greatly increased following the 1982 arrest of Gianfranco Tizzoni, who had a car boot full of marijuana. BCI detectives cultivated Tizzoni over many months and turned him into a supergrass.
Information provided by Tizzoni identified Melbourne painter and docker James Bazley as the hitman who shot dead Donald Mackay in Griffith in 1977.
Tizzoni told police he was the Honoured Society's drug distributor in Victoria. His average weekly receipts from marijuana and heroin sales alone were $200,000.
He admitted to sending huge sums of Australian currency to Europe on behalf of the Calabrian mafia members who controlled the growing and distribution of marijuana, imported and distributed large quantities of hash and heroin and were preparing to import and distribute huge quantities of cocaine.
Tizzoni confirmed the Calabrian mafia didn't hesitate to kill anybody - within or without the organisation - who opposed, betrayed or deceived it.
And most worrying, it had established a strong network of corruption in policing, politics and public office throughout Australia.
Tizzoni's taped evidence, and further investigations by police, led to a confidential 1985 BCI report identifying many principals and members of the Calabrian mafia in Victoria.
"However, staffing levels and lack of resources have prohibited development of this intelligence to a point where action can be taken," the report said.
"Notwithstanding that the Bureau has identified many Organisation principles and members, and activities, legal and illegal, it is virtually powerless to do more that reactively monitor.
"In 1969, the then Commonwealth Police Central Crime Intelligence Bureau, Canberra, produced a composite list of suspected members of the Italian Criminal Society in Australia. That list shows Victoria's total membership as 148, part of an Australian membership of 341. It is not unjustifiable to claim that membership in Victoria now numbers many hundreds, if not thousands.
Alfonso Muratore and his father Vincent Muratore, both fruit merchants who were murdered. Vincenzo Muratore was gunned down outside his Hampton, Victoria home in 1962. His son Alfonso suffered a similar fate in 1992. Picture: Library Source: News Limited
"The Organisation has gradually entrenched itself in this State's society. The comments of Cusack 21 years ago are not only proven by evidenced activity, but it is seen that his predictions, although accurate, did not approach the magnitude of the problems which we have now identified."
The 1985 BCI report was never made public, but two of its officers spoke about some of its contents at a public meeting in Hamilton that year.
Unknown to the then BCI head, Det-Chief Inspector Frank Green, and BCI officer Sen-Det Michael Schuett, a reporter from the Melbourne Herald had been tipped off about what the officers thought was going to be an unreported speech. The front page headline the following day read: "Mafia gangs threaten Victoria, say police".
The two officers were asked to "please explain" by police command and the State Government.
They were astute enough to have stressed at the Hamilton meeting that they were speaking as individuals and that their views and comments were not those of Victoria Police. The reporter's tape proved this and they got off the hook.
But the fallout from their comments echoed around the state.
"This criminal activity threatens to grow to affect everyone of us in Australia in some way," Chief Inspector Green had told the Hamilton meeting.
Sen-Det Schuett said Melbourne millionaires associated with US mafia bosses. He had seen a telex message from an American mafia man promising $500,000 to his Melbourne connection to help finance a worldwide gambling competition.
Crime syndicates were known to buy power in trade unions, governments and other institutions, the detective said.
Godfather Liborio Benvenuto died three years after Frank Green and Michael Schuett alerted the public to the Calabrian mafia's sinister role in Victoria.
The BCI mounted a secret investigation to try to find out who replaced him and was given extra staff to establish a taskforce.
\Alfonso Muratore and his father Vincent Muratore, both fruit merchants who were murdered. Vincenzo Muratore was gunned down outside his Hampton, Victoria home in 1962. His son Alfonso suffered a similar fate in 1992. Picture: Library Source: News Limited
The man suspected of being the new Godfather was listed in BCI files as a major drug dealer who had plans to import 200kg of hash into Victoria every fortnight through a network of corrupt dock workers. The BCI file also connected him to several multi-million dollar marijuana crops around Australia. The file said he ran his illegal business from a Moonee Ponds hotel and it named a former police officer as one of his closest associates.
Physical and electronic surveillance was placed on the man believed to be the new Godfather. But the operation was abandoned when the BCI discovered one of the Victoria Police officers seconded to the taskforce was a close friend of a man who married the target's daughter. The taskforce member even attended the wedding and mingled with the suspected Godfather.
BCI detectives later discovered its target was made aware of the existence of the taskforce shortly after it was formed and that he curtailed his illegal activities as a result. It is not known if the Victoria Police officer was the source of the leak.
The infiltration of the BCI by a Victoria Police officer known to the suspected Godfather meant police were never able to discover if the man replaced Benvenuto as the Boss of Bosses, though his intelligence file has been updated regularly since then and still lists him as a major Calabrian mafia figure who is thought to be criminally active. His name also appeared on a confidential list the NCA produced in the late 1980s of the 23 most senior Calabrian mafia figures in Australia. The NCA presented its list of 23 names to state and federal governments.
TOMORROW: How authorities are tackling the Calabrian mafia - Part Three of Keith Moor's investigation
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