Mafia retribution to be served over Pasquale Barbaro murder
THEY may have been made men in the mafia, but that didn’t make them invincible. Retribution is always served, writes Keith Moor.
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IF Australian gangster Pasquale Barbaro was murdered by anyone other than a fellow Calabrian mafia member then the Mafioso Godfathers will be looking for retribution.
Barbaro was gunned down on Monday night in Sydney after getting into his Mercedes outside the home of his mate, construction industry identity George Alex.
The list of suspects and motives detectives will need to examine is a long one.
Barbaro, 35, was mixing with bikies, Middle Eastern gang heavies and various drug dealers of differing nationalities.
He owed large sums of money to people used to using violence to punish or kill bad debtors.
Barbaro was attempting to intimidate people more used to being intimidators than being intimidated.
Friends and relatives of murdered standover man Joe Antoun knew Barbaro had tried to kill Antoun in 2013, but abandoned the planned hit when Antoun’s wife answered the door.
MORE: Murdered men share more than the name Pasquale Barbaro
Blood-soaked dynasty: Family’s mafia links
Execution style: Barbaro shot dead in car
As an illustration he has enemies, somebody took six shots at Barbaro a year ago. He managed to dodge them while fleeing down a laneway.
A suspect for that shooting, gun for hire Hamad Assaad, was executed outside his Sydney home last month.
There has also been unconfirmed talk in the underworld and the media that Barbaro had broken the Calabrian mafia’s strictly enforced code of silence, known as omerta, by becoming an informer.
With all that chalked up against him, not many were surprised at Barbaro becoming the latest crim to be knocked off.
But it could spark another tit for tat underworld war.
Barbaro was a member of the notorious and powerful Calabrian mafia.
The organisation is known by some Italians as ‘Ndrangheta, by others as L’Onorata Societa (the Honoured Society) or La Famiglia (The Family).
It is simply called the mafia by most in Australia, or the Calabrian mafia to differentiate it from the traditional Sicilian mafia.
Barbaro’s father Giuseppe “Joe” Barbaro was jailed in 2006 in Melbourne and ordered to serve a minimum of seven years for dealing in amphetamines, ecstasy and cannabis.
But he is best known for the Australia-wide publicity he received in 2004 when his daughter Montana was kidnapped.
Three-week-old Montana was snatched from her mother as she packed her car at the Deer Park shopping centre.
Montana was found safe and well by a passing jogger 40 hours later. She had been dumped in an empty North Melbourne house.
The kidnappers were later caught and jailed.
And Pasquale Barbaro is related to a number of other prominent past and present Calabrian mafia figures.
That means the Italian organised crime gang is unlikely to let his death this week go unpunished.
Doing so would go against the centuries-old traditions of the feared secret society.
It may not happen quickly. The Calabrian mafia view is that vengeance is often a dish best served cold.
Mafioso bosses have shown in the past they are prepared to wait years, and sometimes decades, to execute enemies.
Barbaro may have been murdered by the Calabrian mafia because the Godfathers feared he had turned against them.
Probably more likely, he was executed by one of his many non-Calabrian mafia enemies, in which case the Calabrian mafia will want to kill whoever pulled the trigger so the organisation isn’t dishonoured.
Whichever scenario ends up being correct, the broken and bloodied bodies of those murdered will just add to the growing pile of Calabrian mafia hits in Australia — here are just some of them.
There were the Victoria Market murders, which followed the deaths by natural causes of Melbourne Calabrian mafia boss Domenico “The Pope” Italiano and his enforcer Antonio “The Toad” Barbara within weeks of each other in 1962.
That created a battle for leadership of the Calabrian mafia’s powerful Melbourne cell.
A battle that was eventually won by Victoria Market stallholder Liborio Benvenuto, but not before the murders of leadership hopefuls Vincenzo Angilletta and Vincenzo Muratore and the attempted murder and shotgun blasting of Domenico Demarte.
Although Benvenuto restored relative calm during his more than two-decade reign as Godfather, he was quite prepared to use violence, torture and murder to sustain his organisations fearsome reputation.
That was in evidence when he ordered the death of senior Calabrian mafia figure Rocco Medici.
Benvenuto had narrowly escaped death in 1983 when his car was blown up as he was walking towards it at the Melbourne wholesale market. He blamed Medici.
Medici was lured to the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, near Griffith, New South Wales, in 1984 on the pretence of organising a profitable drug deal.
He took his brother-in-law Giuseppe Furina along for the drive.
Both men were tortured and Medici’s ears were cut off before their bodies were weighted and dumped in the river.
The NSW homicide squad received new information about the unsolved Medici and Furina double murder in late 2014.
They were told Benvenuto’s long-term bodyguard Joe Rossi was present when Medici and Furina were executed.
Rossi made a deathbed confession to a close associate and the details of that confession were later provided to the NSW detectives.
The confession included naming the hitman allegedly hired by Benvenuto to get rid of Medici and Furina.
Rossi claimed he rang Benvenuto to alert him that Furina had unexpectedly turned up with Medici for the supposed drug deal and asked what the assassination team should do.
Benvenuto allegedly told Rossi that Furina also had to be killed because “he is in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Police were told Medici trusted the hitman, which was why he was prepared to willingly get in the hitman’s car in Melbourne to be driven to what he thought was a meeting he could make money out of.
That hitman is still alive and living in suburban Melbourne.
There isn’t enough evidence to charge him, though the police Medici and Furina murder file is far from closed and still has the hitman as the prime suspect.
When Benvenuto knew he was dying in the late 1980s, he sounded out Alfonso Muratore to take over from him as the Melbourne Godfather.
Alfonso’s father was the Vincenzo Muratore who was executed in 1964 during the Victoria Market murders.
Eerily, Alfonso was murdered in remarkably similar circumstances in 1992.
Both Muratores died after being blasted by a shotgun as they left their Hampton homes in the early hours; both worked in the Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable market; both were embroiled in Calabrian mafia affairs and both murders are still unsolved.
Another person Benvenuto reached out to possibly replace him as Melbourne Godfather was Giuseppe “Joe” Arena.
Arena never got his tilt at the top job. A rival Calabrian mafia faction killed him six weeks after Benvenuto died in 1988.
Several relatives of the Pasquale Barbaro murdered in Sydney on Monday were named in the Woodward Royal Commission report as being members of the Griffith Calabrian mafia cell which ordered the 1977 execution of anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay.
The Barbaro family tree is a complicated one that police have not been able to fully unravel, so some of the exact relationships between the various criminal Barbaros identified in royal commission and court reports remain sketchy.
There is no doubt the Pasquale Barbaro recently executed in Sydney was the grandson of the Pasquale “Il Principale” Barbaro who was murdered in Brisbane in 1990 after spending months as an informer to the National Crime authority.
He is also related to the Pasquale Barbaro shot dead alongside Melbourne gangster Jason Moran in 2003 and the Pasquale Barbaro who was jailed for life with a 30-year minimum following the 2007 world’s biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
Among the Barbaros named in the 1979 Woodward Royal Commission report as being members of the Griffith Calabrian mafia cell responsible for the Mackay murder were brothers Frank “Yoogali” Barbaro, born 1942, and Rocco Barbaro, born 1949; Rocco Barbaro’s son Saverio Barbaro, born 1948, and Francesco “Little Trees” Barbaro, born 1937, who the report said was a distant relative of brothers Frank and Rocco Barbaro.
Little Trees Barbaro is the father of the Pasquale Barbaro jailed in Melbourne over the 2007 importation of 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy tablets hidden in tomato tins.
He and Yoogali Barbaro are also related through marriage as they each walked down the aisle with sisters of Antonio Sergi, born 1935.
Sergi was also named in the Woodward report as being a prominent member of the Griffith Calabrian mafia cell.
In what is a common Calabrian mafia intermarrying trait, five of Sergi’s six sisters married Calabrian mafia figures. All five men were later named in the Woodward report as being members of the Griffith mafia cell responsible for the murder of Donald Mackay. Saverio Barbaro married his cousin Elizabeth Barbaro.
Vincenzo Barbaro, born 1945, was also named in the Woodward report as a Griffith Calabrian mafia cell member, but Woodward couldn’t establish if there was a family relationship between him and the other Barbaros.
The bombing of the NCA headquarters in Adelaide in 1994 was almost certainly the work of the Calabrian mafia.
NCA agents were in the middle of one of Australia’s biggest Calabrian mafia probes at the time of the bombing.
The letter bomb which exploded in the NCA’s Adelaide office killed NCA agent Geoffrey Bowen and severely injured NCA lawyer Peter Wallis.
It was addressed to Mr Bowen and exploded in his hands.
In more recent times, there is the still unsolved murder of one of the Calabrian mafia’s major money launderers, Mario Condello.
He became the last victim of Melbourne’s bloody gangland war when he was shot dead in 2006 as he was parking his car in his Brighton East garage.
Condello, who was one of underworld identity Mick Gatto’s best mates, was in the thick of that war for years.
As protection for he and his associates, he had bought an Uzi sub-machinegun, a Colt .357 Magnum, a Bentley 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and several automatic pistols from an Adelaide gun dealer.
He was secretly taped saying about underworld rival Carl Williams that “until this f…ing c..t is put in a hole there will be no peace”.
The now dead Williams remains a strong suspect for having organised the Condello hit.
But another theory is the Calabrian mafia ordered his death as it feared he was considering becoming an informer to get a lesser sentence over the conspiracy to murder charges he was facing at the time of his death.
Condello had done time in jail before getting bail on those charges.
The Godfathers knew Condello hadn’t handled that jail time well and was desperate to avoid going back behind bars.
Possibly desperate enough to commit what in the vengeful eyes of Calabrian mafia members is the unpardonable sin of breaking the code of omerta by talking to police.
Keith Moor is the author of the recently released book Busted, which is a history of the Calabrian mafia in Australia.
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