THEY were modern-day bushrangers, committing crimes up and down the East Coast before disappearing into the bush.

But after eight years on the run, father and son fugitives Gino and Mark Stocco were finally captured by heavily-armed police at a remote property in central NSW which doubled as a cannabis farm.

Police soon discovered the body of the property’s caretaker decaying in a shed. Read this chilling extract from Nino Bucci’s new book.

EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXTRACT

BY October 7, the fifth day in a row of temperatures reaching more than 31C at Pinevale, it appeared that spring would be only a month long. Summer had pushed it aside, and planned to stay until late April. Mark was out of bed by about 8am. His father and (farm caretaker) Rosario Cimone were already awake.

When Mark went to join them in the yard, they were having another scrap. Rosario wanted Gino to move cattle from the area immediately surrounding the owner’s house to another yard.

The pair walked back to the house where they were living, and the argument continued.

By this time, the argument — as often happens — was about something completely different, having morphed to encompass the festering disdain Gino had for Rosario’s incompetence.

“Dad was always telling him off about the tractor and how he couldn’t drive the tractor, he busted the tractor and stuff like that,” Mark said.

“Yeah, it was like voices raised, he’s saying, ‘Ross, you’re useless, you can’t, you shouldn’t even be driving that tractor,’ just stuff like that.”

Rosario was at breaking point. He was constantly being told he was useless by a bloke he and his mates had done a favour for. Every day was spent in dust and heat and choking isolation.

The other three men involved in the plot were coming and going from Sydney as they pleased, yet here he was, stuck babysitting a fledgling dope crop with two people he increasingly despised. He decided to go to Sydney to talk to ‘the bricklayer’ and sort it out.

Pinevale couldn’t keep being run the way it was. Rosario and the Stoccos both felt as if they had been backed into a corner.

“It sort of came to a bit of a boiling point,” Mark told the police.

Rosario packed his white Mitsubishi Magna and left, saying little to the Stoccos other than that he was going to Sydney.

The five-hour drive started with the dirt track leading from Pinevale. But he only made it to the front gate. It was padlocked, and he didn’t have the key. He tore back up the dirt track to Pinevale, and soon was arguing with Gino in front of the house, demanding the key to the lock.

They blued about who had changed the lock, and where the key was. Rosario rummaged around the house before ordering Gino to find it and storming back out to wait by his car.

During this rant, Rosario told the Stoccos he would be calling the bricklayer to ‘sort this out’, and that his mate wanted ‘to get rid of youse’.

The Stoccos had started packing when Rosario left, knowing he would not get very far and expecting their time at Pinevale was ending. Now that he had returned, and another spat had erupted, they knew it was over.

As Rosario stood by his car waiting, Gino and Mark went inside. Rosario thought they were looking for the key, but they had no intention of helping him leave.

Within minutes of his returning to Pinevale, the Stoccos said later, they had decided to kill him. The Stoccos’ anger was like a bucket under a dripping tap.

And Rosario Cimone was the drip that made it spill over. When it finally did, it is curious that Mark, not his father, was the aggressor and took charge.

He told Gino to kill Rosario; he was going to talk to the others and have the Stoccos kicked off Pinevale. It was the latest injustice in a litany of woes, and Rosario had to pay.

Later, the pair would say they feared that Rosario and the other men were going to harm them, and that because of their mafia links they believed they were capable of anything.

This may have been contrived to make it look as though Gino had acted in self-defence, or perhaps they were trying to convince themselves. But it is clear that when Mark recounted the actions of October 7 to police three weeks later, he was motivated by fury, not fear.

“Dad didn’t even want to do it. He just said, ‘Tie him up or f**ken let’s leave,’ and I said, I just, I just snapped,” Mark told police.

“I just said, ‘Kill him’. And then he — probably because I said that, Dad got the courage to do it.”

Gino described it later as caving in. Under their bed was a 12-gauge Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. The pair had stolen it from Doug Redding in Cecil Plains. It was such a reliable and stylish weapon that Remington claimed they had sold 11 million of them, making it the best-selling shotgun in history.

It was loaded with five or six rounds of two different types of cartridges, which had also been stolen from Redding. The cartridges contained tiny metal pellets: one type had eighty-eight pellets; the other had 150 pellets, which were slightly smaller — not even the size of half a pea. Pumping the shotgun loads a cartridge.

Pull the trigger and the pellets are set forth, dispersing wider and wider with each millisecond, until they find something to careen into.

Mark reached under the bed, grabbed the black Remington shotgun and handed it to Gino. He thought it was best that his father shot Rosario since he was more adept at handling and loading the gun.

“I’d used it once or twice but it had a safety on and I wasn’t sure, you know, when you’re about to shoot someone, you want to be sure you’re going to fire the shot off, I suppose,” Mark said.

“So, yeah, I actually handed him the gun and said, ‘Yeah, you shoot. You know how to use the gun better than me’.”

Gino walked out of the house with the shotgun, with Mark following. Rosario looked at them bemusedly from where he stood near the car; it was as if he thought it was a joke, or that the pair were only threatening him, Mark felt. Gino removed the safety and pumped the shotgun. He walked towards Rosario.

When he was two metres away, he fired. Rosario flinched just before Gino pulled the trigger.

Now he was doubled over, his body burning as dozens of perfectly round metal spheres ripped through it.

He had an entry wound about the size of a 50-cent piece in his large gut, just to the left of his bellybutton. As he bent over, struggling for air, trying to make sense of what had happened, Gino pumped the shotgun again. Rosario would not have seen it, but he would have heard it; the spent cartridge being expelled and another being loaded into the chamber.

Gino shot Rosario again. This wound was smaller and higher and to the right, just below Cimone’s ribs.

Dozens more pellets buried themselves in his flesh, and he fell to the ground. A small amount of intestine protruded from his abdomen. He started to froth at the mouth. Then he took his last breath.

* Edited extract from The Stoccos, The Eight-Year Manhunt that Captured Australia, by Nino Bucci, published by Viking, RRP $34.99