Italian Mafia in Australia flourishes, using Covid to traffic drugs, launder cash
The Italian Mafia are “entrenched” in Australia with new alliances with Lebanese organised crime to traffic drugs, guns and cash.
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The Italian Mafia remains “entrenched” in Australia with a review finding it had flourished during Covid-19 and continued to be considered the “sixth state” of Italy from which to market criminality.
Italian police first coined the term almost 20 years ago when in 2002 it appealed to the Australian Federal Police to not close its Rome-based bureau, with intelligence the Mafia considered Australia as an autonomous Italian state, with its own Godfather reporting into Calabria.
A review by the Italian Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza national police – in conjunction with Interpol and member state forces including the AFP, FBI from the US, the German BKA and Canadian Mounties – has reaffirmed the Mafia has continued to “thrive” notably in cocaine trafficking.
The AFP-led Operation Ironside last week specifically captured Australia Mafia-linked figures inadvertently using the AN0M encryption communications app being watched by police.
Australia had stopped being considered a “target market” for trafficked drugs instead treated by the Mafia as an autonomous region of Italy – albeit external and on the other side of the world – from which to further criminal enterprise.
“That view (of Australia) remains unchanged and if anything has only grown,” a law enforcer said yesterday.
The Interpol initiative noted it was not a case of the Mafia re-emerging in foreign nations, notably Australia and Canada, since they never left but had used the Covid-19 period and the year prior to consolidate and flourish particularly in laundering money.
The review flagged six designated ‘Ndrangheta “locales” in Australia with family-linked but diversified bloodlines having “penetrated” all three tiers of government, wholly controlled by local chiefs but in contact and direction to leading bosses in Italy.
The ‘Ndrangheta had surpassed the Sicilian based Cosa Nostra mafia in this country.
While Australia’s Mafia, established through migrants in the 1920s initially in South Australia, has now had to forge alliances with Lebanese and Chinese criminal entities for trafficking drugs and counterfeit goods, firearms and money laundering they still practice strict discipline in contacts, associations and deals through heavily coded and often hand written messages or only face-to-face meetings.
Such is their long game entrenchment they had not infiltrated but rather penetrated senior positions from councils to federal government administration level, ingratiating local communities through social connections and sporting groups of their kids and using familial and home clan contacts in key industries of transport and shipping ports, import/export agencies and law enforcement to further their illicit crimes.
According to Italian police, the ‘Ndrangheta, which controls 60 per cent of the European cocaine market, had just prior to Covid-19 movement restrictions dispatched two cells of four clans to Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and WA specifically to sanction the structure and drug trafficking alliances.
“The ‘Ndrangheta is an invisible threat and a dangerous criminal business partner,” Interpol said adding the Mafia group was flexible and adaptable enough to exploit the new socio-economic landscape created by the Covid pandemic.
It is known the AFP has a covert operation underway into the Mafia in Australia; its Rome bureau closed for budget reasons never reopened.
+Catch up on Sky News’ doco on Australia’s cocaine crisis again 8pm Saturday and 10.30pm Sunday AEST
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