Blood-soaked dynasty: Executed Sydney crime figure Pasquale Barbaro’s family links to Mafia
CRIME kingpin Pasquale Barbaro, gunned down on the street in a gangland execution in Sydney, had a family pedigree with throwbacks to the Italian Mafia and littered with dead bodies.
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SYDNEY crime kingpin Pasquale Barbaro had a family pedigree with throwbacks to the Italian Mafia and littered with dead bodies.
His grandfather and cousin were both killed in gangland hits and last night Barbaro joined them in yet another chapter of the family’s blood-spilled history.
Like his ‘nonno’, Barbaro had previously escaped an attempt on his life last year when he was targeted in a professional hit that went wrong in Leichhardt. But, as in true gangland legend, his luck was to run out in a blood-spattered Earlwood gutter last night.
His namesake, grandfather Pasquale Barbaro, was shot during a gangland hit in Brisbane in 1990 and a cousin, also a Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while in the company of underworld figure Jason Moran, who was also murdered in the same shooting.
And yet another Pasquale Barbaro was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years’ jail over the world’s biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
Retired Mafia godfather, Pasquale “Peter” Barbaro lived a remarkably quiet and nondescript life in the Brisbane suburbs until, like his grandson last night, hitmen came calling.
Barbaro’s neighbours thought the unassuming 58-year-old was a retired council employee from Canberra who had settled in Brisbane for a relaxing life with his young Filipino bride.
The couple had a five-year-old daughter and kept to themselves.
Everything was not as it seemed though.
Barbaro had been the boss of the Calabrian mafia’s Canberra cell until he ran afoul of the criminal organisation.
Fearing for his life, he started giving information to the National Crime Authority in 1989 in secretly recorded interviews.
Some of it pertained to the 1984 mafia murders of Melbourne gangsters Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina. Medici’s ears were cut off before both bodies were dumped in the Murrumbidgee River near the Calabrian mafia enclave of Griffith in NSW.
‘When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia’
His past came to haunt him when in 1989, he was targeted in a shooting which he survived after being blasted by a shotgun in both shoulders.
The following year he wasn’t so lucky. After rising at 6am to get his daily newspaper, he was greeted on his front lawn by an ‘Italian’ man who after a short argument, stabbed Barbaro then shot him throuigh the chest.
His hysterical wife pleaded with the gunman as he calmly performed his execution, leaving Barbaro lying in a pool of blood in the gutter.
It was later reported Barbaro had extensive links with organised crime in Australia and Italy. He was part of a multi-million-dollar crime syndicate with tentacles stretching around the world, though he lived a remarkably humble lifestyle.
The pensioner was born in the Mafia stronghold of Plati in the Calabrian region of Italy and while living in Canberra came under the notice of police in the early 1980s as a “person of influence’’.
At the time of the first attempt on Barbaro’s life, a federal Mafia expert said it was believed his death had been ordered because he had divorced his well-connected Italian wife, to take up with a younger woman.
“We have been told Barbaro has dishonored the Honored Society,’’ the expert said.
“That honor can only be repaid with blood; that it does not matter how long it takes, it will be done.’’
Canberra police records include references to how, over the years, Barbaro always had an eye for the ladies and was often seen going to Canberra motels with women other than his wife.
Police believed the execution probably had much more to do with Barbaro spilling his guts about what he knew regarding mafia murders and the large scale cultivation of marijuana in remote areas of Queensland and NSW.
The Herald Sun newspaper reported that it had seen hundreds of pages of transcripts of the secretly taped conversations between NCA officers and Barbaro. It was also reported he had been talking to the NCA about the killing of Colin Winchester, the Assistant Commissioner in the Australian Federal Police.
In one, Barbaro said there were about 3000 Calabrian mafia members in Australia, but most were followers.
“You can destroy quickly when you send two, three dozen people out of the country,” Barbaro was recorded saying.
“New generation sick and tired. New generation want different life. When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia.”
Retired NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small says the mafia activities in Queensland go back as far as the 1920s when migrants from Calabria set up protection rackets on the cane fields of the north, killing and maiming if they did not get what they wanted.
“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 told me, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
Another relative, also named Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while sitting in a van next to underworld figure Jason Moran, as they watched a kids football training session.
As the children in the back of the van screamed, Moran and his mate Pasquale Barbaro were blown away in an execution that shocked a city already used to years of gangland violence.
Barbaro, known as “Little Pat”, is believed to have returned to Melbourne about two years ago after serving time in a Perth jail over amphetamine charges. Unlike Moran, he did not have an extensive criminal record.
His brutal execution led to the formation of the Purana Task Force that would finally put some of the gangland war’s key players on a course to justice.
