Andrew Rule: Why fruit and veg wasn’t healthy for these murder victims
The brazen shooting death of grocer and junior footy coach Paul Virgona was a reminder that the history of Melbourne’s fruit and vegetables trade has a long, colourful — and deadly history, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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Fruit and vegetables are good for those who eat their greens. Buying and selling them maybe not so much.
The brazen shooting of a fruit shop operator on the EastLink freeway last weekend was as spectacularly violent as a Colombian cartel hit, but history suggests its roots are closer to home.
Paul Virgona was mown down by a high-powered weapon that pumped bullets into the van he used to move farm produce from market to shop.
Time was when the Calabrian market-garden mafia used shotguns loaded with “lupara” (wolf shot) but that peasant stuff went out with piano accordions and hair oil.
Of course, the murdered man was a “cleanskin” with no criminal convictions of note: a husband, father and popular junior football coach in Croydon.
But investigators looking at motives for murder will doubt he was shot for dragging the wrong player in a finals game.
It is highly unlikely but nonetheless possible that Virgona is the victim of a mistaken-identity murder.
It happens often enough to be pencilled into the homicide squad’s list of common reasons for killing.
The extreme nature of the hit obviously has no bearing on whether or not Virgona was the intended target.
If hired killers had the brains to gather intelligence and execute plans as well as they execute “targets”, they’d be in a better line of work. In real life, killers are often evil but rarely geniuses.
Some examples.
Jane Thurgood-Dove, innocent mother of three, was shot dead 21 years ago in the driveway of her Niddrie home by paid killers who got the right street but the wrong woman in the wrong car at the wrong house.
They chased her around her car and shot her in front of her terrified children. The intended target, one Carmel Kypri, lived a block away.
Lindsay Simpson, a harmless tradesman, was shot dead in front of his wife and baby in late 1984 by another stupid hitman, Roy “Red Rat” Pollitt, who mistook Simpson for his criminal brother-in-law Alan Williams.
Simpson said he was the wrong man but Pollitt killed him anyway, simply because Simpson had seen his face.
More relevant to Virgona’s death than those examples are two people who died violently, almost certainly on the orders of mafia mobsters, merely because they were unlucky enough to share names with intended victims.
One was Patrick Keenan, a drifter whose body was found face down in an irrigation ditch near Griffith in 1974, days after a government fruit inspector also named Patrick Keenan naively reported a marijuana crop to police on the payroll of local mafia boss Tony Sergi.
This is the Sergi who conspired with fellow Calabrian crooks to have local businessman Donald Mackay murdered in 1977. The same Sergi who died of old age, and inexplicably wealthy, two years ago.
The second murder debacle is closer to home for the Virgona family. That was the execution of fruit and vegetable buyer Giuseppe “Joe” Quadara outside a Toorak supermarket in the early hours of May 28, 1999. No one can prove the trigger man was the late Andrew “Benji” Veniamin, hired by a known Calabrian criminal family, but that’s the way to bet.
The story goes that Veniamin was paid to kill another Joe Quadara, a man also connected with Melbourne’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a byword for murderous violence since being taken over by the Calabrian “Honoured Society” after World War II.
In fact, the rot had begun even earlier. Calabrian “Black Hand” mobsters had preyed on their own countrymen in the 1930s, confident their victims wouldn’t call the cops.
Antonio “The Toad” Barbara, an enforcer for Melbourne’s “Godfather”, Domenico “Il Papa” Italiano, in the 1950s, did five years for killing a woman in 1936. The crime was committed near Queen Victoria Market, which was then the wholesale market. Funny, that.
The “omerta” code of silence ensured the group’s inner workings were secretive, if not secret. But power struggles over illicit profits from manipulating the wholesale market meant blood was sometimes spilt in public.
Whoever headed the “Honoured Society” got to skim huge profits from entrenched rackets. That meant that any power vacuum could lead to conflict, often assassination by ambush.
Power struggles aside, the day-to-day business of extortion won’t work unless its victims fear death. Examples have to be made of anyone who resists. All of which suggests an obvious line of inquiry if the current forensic investigation doesn’t identify suspects.
The Virgona hit seems to fit a pattern of what used to be called “market murders”. There have been others but the shooting of Vincenzo Muratore as he left home in Hampton at 2.30am one night in 1964 still resonates.
One reason for that is because, 28 years later, his son Alfonso was also shot dead while leaving home in Hampton. Muratore senior had been caught in a power struggle after the death of the old boss Domenico Italiano; junior had other problems.
Firstly, Alfonso had breached Honoured Society etiquette by leaving his Calabrian wife, member of a “connected” family, to live openly with his “skip” girlfriend, Karen.
His other problem was telling Coles Myer produce buyers he could help them save millions in corrupt payments. Crocodile wrestling might have been safer.
The attempted murder of a Coles Myer troubleshooter some two years earlier had underlined how badly the society took any threat to its rackets. The Coles Myer man, John Vasilopolous, answered his doorbell just before Christmas, 1990. The shotgun blast did not quite kill him.
Shooting the troubleshooter was strictly business. Coles Myer responded by engaging respected Geelong fruit and vegetable tycoon Frank Costa to supply their stores.
Costa, incidentally of Sicilian heritage, apparently stared down his critics in the market scene. He has speculated that one of his loyal contractors volunteered that if hostilities broke out, it would be “two of yours for every one of ours”.
The faceless men of the Honoured Society try to hold up a smooth mask to the outside world but there is always the potential for simmering violence to erupt.
The family of the late Giuseppe Arena, alias “the friendly Godfather”, lives with the effects of the society’s internal wars.
In late 1987, Arena hosted his daughter’s wedding for 450 people at a Brunswick venue. “Friends” shook his hand and kissed his cheek. When the “old” Godfather, Liborio Benvenuto, died in bed nine months later, the financially-astute Arena seemed the anointed successor. But not everyone agreed.
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Arena was shot dead that winter as he took out the garbage at his Bayswater home. Which, coincidentally, is walking distance from where the killers’ second getaway car was dumped after Virgona was killed.
Some recall another sinister event out that way. In September, 2001, another Croydon fruiterer, Rosario Pezzano, vanished from behind San Marino restaurant in Ringwood. His ute was found with its driver-side window smashed but he was never seen again.
At the time, the family fruit and vegetable business was going well. The night he disappeared, Pezzano was going to a meeting in the city to discuss buying a Bourke St bar.
But someone, somewhere, had other ideas.