Geelong boss Frank Costa's mafia fight

THE Calabrian mafia tried to bribe Geelong Football Club president Frank Costa with $1 million cash a year for life.

THE Calabrian mafia tried to bribe Geelong Football Club president Frank Costa with $1 million cash a year for life.

Mr Costa claims all he and his brother Anthony had to do in return was agree to go along with a lucrative extortion racket the Italian organised crime gang was operating at Melbourne's wholesale fruit and vegetable market.

"It was 50c a case and there were many, many thousands of boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables as part of this racket," he said.

In an interview to be shown on Channel Seven's Gangs of Oz on Wednesday nihgt, tonight, Mr Costa reveals he refused the bribe and that the Calabrian mafia also threatened to kill him and his brother if they did anything to hinder the multi-million-dollar extortion racket.

Those death threats came after prominent Coles board members Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew approached Mr Costa in 1990 and asked him to help them smash the Calabrian mafia's 50c-a-case extortion racket, which had been running for more than 25 years.

The racket involved the Calabrian mafia bribing supermarket chain buyers to take all their fruit and vegetables at inflated prices from Melbourne market stall-holders who had been forced to pay a levy of 50c a case directly to the mafia.

That mafia tax meant Coles was paying $5 million a year more than it should have for fruit and vegetable, a cost it passed on to consumers.

Mr Costa initially agreed his Geelong-based Costa Group wholesale fruit and vegetable company would supply Coles and would buy the produce from growers who hadn't paid the 50c-a-case mafia tax.

It prompted the Calabrian mafia to begin a campaign of terror against the Costa Group and Coles, which included destroying property, shootings, beatings and death threats.

Mr Costa bravely hit back when a senior mafia figure gave him two choices when he was trying to persuade the Costa Group to take part in the extortion racket.

"Those choices were $1 million in cash each year, and if that didn't appeal to me the other offer was a bullet and that would be delivered post haste," Mr Costa said.

The death threat was delivered through his younger brother, Anthony.

"I'm no hero, but I do know you fight fire with fire," Mr Costa said.

"I said to Anthony, 'you go back tomorrow morning and tell that guy that anyone in our family gets touched, a hair on their head, exactly double that for that group'.

"And we'd start with that guy's family first. You have to bluff them - and it worked.

"Anthony's a big burly bloke anyway so he went and delivered that and that stopped it."