Evil life: Dark rise of a seedy underworld
The Calabrian Mafia grew to become the largest, most ruthless crime syndicate in Australia and, as a new book reveals, it remains a key outpost in global organised crime, writes Grantlee Kieza.
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NICOLA MAMONE had every reason to revel in his evil life as he walked along the main street of steamy Innisfail.
It was 10am on March 6, 1934, and the 46-year-old Italian barber was chuffed with the respect and fear he generated as a member of a “Black Hand’’ extortion gang terrorising north Queensland.
Mamone, assisted by Giuseppe Buiti and Giuseppe Parisi, had recently cut the ears off a rival who was threatening to burn the crops of local sugar cane farmers if they did not pay protection money, but even after Mamone went to work with his razor, his mutilated victim played by the rules of the Calabrian mafia. He refused to tell police anything about his attacker.
Now as Mamone and his companion strolled along Edith Street, the game changed. An Italian man bent on revenge crept up from behind and drew a revolver. Giovanni Iacona had no ears but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight and, as the demon barber tried to run, his assailant fired six shots that left Mamone in a pool of blood.
Iacona was sentenced to life in prison but deported back to Italy within months.
The following year a Calabrian immigrant and prosperous Ingham cane farmer, Domenico Scarcella, was killed by three blasts from a shotgun. When the victim’s belongings were searched a letter was discovered demanding £250 in extortion money. It bore the Black Hand logo of death.
The writer was Francesco Femio, another Calabrian, who controlled more than 100 prostitutes in Cairns, Townsville and Innisfail. He was also killed by multiple shotgun blasts. His lover, 22-year-old Jean Morris, died from 35 stab wounds.
In his fascinating new book Evil Life, written with journalist Tom Gilling, former senior policeman Clive Small writes that the Calabrian mafia’s foothold in Australia began among Italian migrants in north Queensland in the 1920s and that 90 years later the 31 crime families at the head of the ’ndrangheta (pronounced en-drank-aye-ta) in Australia still have ties to crime bosses in Italy and exert more power than ever before.
“Since the early 1920s the Calabrian mafia has formed Australia’s longest-running organised crime syndicate,’’ Small says.
“And during that time there have been continuous periods of violence, serious crime, corruption and even the forming of alliances with political parties.’’
During his 38 years with the NSW Police in which he rose to be Assistant Commissioner, Small, 69, worked on some of the biggest cases in Australia, including the arrest of serial killer Ivan Milat.
He says his eyes were opened to the ’ndrangheta crime web when he worked for the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking following the mafia-ordered murder of anti-drugs crusader Donald Mackay in Griffith, NSW, in 1977.
He documents the mafia’s rise in Australia from bush extortion gangs in the 1920s to its multimillion-dollar crime empire today with tentacles that have reach into the police, judiciary, immigration department and federal and state politics.
Small began working on his book in 2008 but its publication was delayed by court cases and long-running suppression orders following the world’s biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne. which involved key mafia figures.
He says the mafia’s domination of Australian crime began when three godfathers arrived from Italy in 1922.
Most of the Calabrian migrants who soon followed found labouring jobs in the cane fields of FNQ but others quickly found more lucrative fields on the wrong side of the law.
The gangsters brought with them traditions of violence, intimidation and macabre initiation rituals into what they called “the evil life’’.
“The mafia had been able to grow in Calabria in the 1800s because it was then a very lawless part of Italy and it was easy for committed criminals to take over towns through corruption and intimidation,’’ Small says.
“As part of the initiation rituals you had to be sworn into the organisation and that had to be done by family, so you were unlikely ever to roll over to the law because you would be betraying your family who could then die as a result.’’
The author documents a murder in Brisbane in the 1920s when one Italian immigrant was butchered for cheating on the daughter of a mafia chief. His heart was cut out and taken back to Italy to show the aggrieved woman.
Other crime families put down roots in Sydney and Melbourne, where the first mafia murder of an Australian policeman took place in 1925.
Calabrian gangsters also settled in the NSW Riverina town of Griffith and built ornate “grass castles’’ from their crops of marijuana and, according to Small, were protected by local politician Al Grassby, the Federal Immigration Minister who constantly turned a blind eye to crime all around him.
“From the early 1970s the Calabrian mafia became involved in the drug trade through Robert Trimbole in Griffith and then moved their activities north,’’ Small says, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
He says despite the recent jailing of drug lords Frank Madafferi and Pat Barbaro, the ’ndrangheta remains Australia’s most durable organised crime group, responsible for more murders and violence in Australia — at least 40 since the 1970s — than any other criminal organisation and still exerting political influence on both major political parties with lavish donations.
From the time they landed in Queensland, the mafia used fear as its chief weapon.
Small writes chillingly of the ’ndrangheta in Italy settling a dispute with heroin suppliers from Turkey in the 1980s. The Turks were squashed down to the size of tin cans in a car wrecking press.
EVIL LIFE
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