Andrew Rule: May the deadliest month for mafia bosses in Melbourne

May is the one month of the year when Melbourne mobsters ought to consider a trip to Vegas or Chicago or Sicily — anywhere is safer than home.

The Ides of March finished off Julius Caesar but May is the toughest month for wannabe bosses in Australia’s Calabrian mafia.

It’s 25 years ago this week since Frank Benvenuto was shot in his blue Holden Statesman near his Beaumaris home.

Benvenuto, son of longtime Calabrian N‘Drangheta “Godfather” Liborio Benvenuto, tried to call his pet gunman as he was dying. But Victor Peirce didn’t pick up in time to hear any last words.

By the time Peirce called back four minutes later, the shooting was all over bar the shouting. The greedy greengrocer was brown bread.

That happened on May 8, 2000. A week later, another career criminal with malevolent mobster connections was shot dead in intriguing circumstances in the Esquire Motel in St Kilda.

His name was Richard Mladenich and he was a known associate of the fatally-charming Italian, Rocco Arico, who might have been the last to see him alive. And who, incidentally, rubbed shoulders in Benvenuto-type circles.

Arico has been in prison for quite some time now on other matters and doesn’t talk about what went down at the Esquire. No one else who was around that night appears to be alive.

This image has been ID-ed by Paddy Murphy. Rocco Arico arrives at County Court on Monday, October 17, 2016, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Picture: Hamish Blair

Proof that the police have an open mind about Mladenich’s sudden cancellation is that the late Dino Dibra, the late Mark Moran and the late Carl Williams have all been named in connection with it.

No matter who pulled the trigger, Mladenich the unpredictable standover man wasn’t mourned much or by many. Whereas two wholesale vegetable market identities known to Frank Benvenuto’s family were greatly missed by their loved ones — even before the police knew the pair was dead.

That double murder happened 16 years before the killings of Mladenich and Frank Benvenuto — but, like theirs, it happened in May. That’s a coincidence. What’s not a coincidence is that the killings also involved the Benvenutos.

The murders came to light on May 6, 1984, when an angler fishing in the Murrumbidgee near Griffith thought he’d hooked the biggest Murray Cod in the river. In fact, it was the body of Rocco Medici, who had travelled to Griffith with his extremely unlucky brother-in-law Giuseppe Furina a few days earlier.

Police pulled both bodies out of the river, and immediately concluded it was secret mob men’s business. The clue was that Medici’s ears had been hacked off, he’d been shot twice in the head and stabbed in the stomach.

The stomach stabbing is most likely a precaution cold-blooded crooks take when disposing of bodies “to sleep with the fishes.” It’s so they don’t bloat and float.

Frank Benvenuto lays slumped in his car after being shot in the chest in Beaumaris on May 8, 2000. Picture: Cameron L’estrange

Benvenuto’s lavish funeral.

The difference in the two men’s status as murder victims was clearly marked by the killer, acting on boss’s orders. Medici’s ears being cut off was a ritual disfigurement symbolising that he heard too much. Furina kept his ears but not his life, which probably wasn’t a great comfort.

Medici, who lived in East Keilor, had gone to Griffith with Furina. He either went with, or met, a third person later revealed as Joe Rossi, a Benvenuto henchman.

As Rossi would reveal to a friend on his deathbed in 2008, Medici had been lured to take the trip north with the promise of a lucrative drug deal with Griffith N‘Drangheta members, of whom there were many. Rossi claimed the triggerman was another Calabrian who (in 2008) was still alive and living in Melbourne.

Medici’s brother-in-law Furina had come along just for the ride.

After NSW police had identified the bodies, their Victorian counterparts went to the homes of the dead to “break the news.”

The police were surprised to be greeted by weeping widows dressed in black. Those broken-hearted women (and their children) had known about their respective husbands’ murders well before the police, and probably before the bodies had been identified.

In mobster land, almost everyone is related by blood, marriage or money. Why were Medici and Furina murdered? Because Medici was suspected of being involved in a plot against the Godfather, Liborio Benvenuto, father of Frank.

Liborio, who would die of natural causes in 1988, had acted nonchalantly about his parked car being blown up in 1983. He said at the time he had no enemies and no idea who would fill his car with gelignite. But it seems clear he blamed Rocco Medici for trying to wrest control of the Calabrian “honoured society” from him. Medici’s cards were marked.

Rocco Medici’s body was found in the Murrumbidgee River, near Griffith, in 1984.

It was 24 years later, in 2008, that the former Benvenuto insider Joe Rossi told a friend he was present during the murders.

Rossi had been worried that Furina had unexpectedly turned up with the target, Medici. Rossi said he’d called Liborio Benvenuto, who told him it was too bad: Furina was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to be eliminated.

All of which shows how complicated it could be for interstate detectives trying to solve what was actually a Victorian murder committed north of the border.

Victorian detectives had the same problem when Frank Benvenuto was shot in 2000. There were plenty of people who might have held a grudge against him — including friends or relatives of Benvenuto’s estranged brother-in-law, Alfonso Muratore, shot dead eight years before Frank was.

Muratore had been shot with a shotgun, traditional weapon of old-style mafiosi, as he left the Hampton house where he slept with his mistress Karen Mansfield.

He had been killed for one of two reasons, or maybe both.

The first was for threatening to end the mafia’s long-running “50 cents a case” fruit and vegetables extortion racket at the wholesale market, which cost Coles up to $5m a year and other supermarkets huge amounts.

The other reason that Muratore had a target on his back was that he had committed the unpardonable sin of leaving his Calabrian wife for his “Aussie” mistress. His wife was a daughter of the godfather Liborio Benvenuto, which made his bedroom adventures as dicey as swimming in a shark tank.

Muratore’s wife’s brothers and their associates reputedly saw his actions as brazenly disrespectful.

His murder was virtually identical to that of his own father Vince Muratore, killed with a shotgun as he left his Hampton house to go to the market in January, 1964.

Victor Peirce is lead into the Magistrates’ Court by police.

The scene of Peirce’s shooting death in Bay Street, Port Melbourne. Peirce died like his boss, sitting in his car in the month of May.

Neither Muratore was killed in May, but two people well known to them were.

Almost exactly a year before Frank Benvenuto’s murder, another Calabrian greengrocer, Joe Quadara, had been shot dead before dawn outside a Toorak supermarket. The date: May 28, 1999.

Quadara had lost his own business and was working for the supermarket, a fact that made investigators wonder if he were the wrong target. Another Joe Quadara was also heavily involved in the wholesale fruit and vegetable scene. Did the shooter get an average Joe by mistake?

Two years after Frank Benvenuto’s death, the man he tried to call with his last breath was shot while he sat in his car in Bay St, Port Melbourne. That, of course, was Victor Peirce. He also was shot in May: May 1, 2002.

There is little doubt that the prolific hitman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin shot Peirce and had probably shot Frank Benvenuto. He was a busy freelance killer. But who was pulling the strings?

Among those arrested in 2008 over Peirce’s shooting many years later was Vince Benvenuto, brother of Frank and son of Liborio. He was later acquitted amid much secrecy, having refused to give evidence that would implicate anyone else.

The moral of the story is this: fruit and vegetables are good for you but only if you eat them instead of trying to corner the market.

As for the month of May, it’s the one month of the year when Melbourne mobsters ought to consider a trip to Vegas or Chicago or New York. Anywhere safer than home.