Bruno ‘The Fox’ Romeo, one of Australia’s highest-ranking mafia figures, has died in Adelaide
EXCLUSIVE: Senior police are expecting an influx of organised crime figures for the funeral of mafia boss Bruno “The Fox” Romeo — once Australia’s most wanted man — who has died in Adelaide.
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BRUNO “The Fox” Romeo, one of Australia’s highest-ranking mafia figures, has died in Adelaide.
Senior police and federal authorities are expecting an influx of organised crime figures to attend his funeral. NCA bombing suspect Domenic Perre is also expected to attend.
Perre is related to Romeo’s wife, Nazzarena, and is closely associated with his three sons Mick, Joe and Bruno jnr.
Like their father, Joe and Bruno jnr have both served lengthy prison sentences after being convicted of drug cultivation and trafficking offences.
Bruno Romeo senior, 87, of Rostrevor, died in Adelaide at the weekend. He was once one of Australia’s most wanted men before his arrest in NSW in December, 1992, ending a 2 1/2-year national and international police manhunt. He was wanted over a $8 million cannabis crop found growing on a remote WA cattle station in 1990.
A joint National Crime Authority/WA Police taskforce — Dubbed Operation Rottweiler — eventually caught him at a 750-plant cannabis crop site, some up to 4.5m tall, near Lismore, in northern NSW.
Dubbed “The Fox’’ because of his ability to elude capture, Bruno Romeo managed to stay one step ahead of police for almost 30 years before he was finally charged with drug offences and given a 10-year sentence in WA.
A crime intelligence report prepared for the Federal Government three decades ago outed Romeo as a South Australian leader of the so-called Honoured Society — or ‘Ndrangheta — a Calabrian organised crime group.
He and Nazzarena were born in the Calabrian village of Plati and came to Australia in 1951, settling for a time in Griffith.
In September, 1994, one of Romeo’s three sons, Giuseppe “Joe’’ Romeo, was jailed for four years with a two-year non-parole period over a cannabis crop at Cobar, New South Wales.
Joe Romeo’s younger brother, Bruno Lee Romeo was jailed in WA in 1987 over a 1.5ha crop of cannabis and was allowed to transfer to SA to complete a three-year jail term.
At Romeo senior’s trial in the WA Supreme Court in 1994, it was revealed he had taken out murder contracts on two protected witnesses.
Prosecutor Simon Stone told Justice Terry Walsh the two men under threat were key Crown witnesses who would testify against him at his trial on conspiracy and cannabis-growing charges.
Mr Stone said the witnesses — a former bankrupt West Australian farmer and a former NSW storekeeper — had already testified against Romeo at his committal hearing.
Reading from a National Crime Authority affidavit, Mr Stone said: “Information received indicates that (Romeo) has been involved directly and indirectly in offering to bribe the two witnesses, arranging contracts to kill them and approaches to members of their families and others to ascertain the whereabouts of the two witnesses’’.
The allegations arose during an application for bail by Romeo, then aged 64.
Opposing the application, Mr Stone said Romeo and his wife Nazzarena allegedly disappeared from their home at Skye, in the Adelaide Hills, within half an hour of WA police issuing a warrant for Romeo’s arrest in 1990.
