Calabrian Mafia boss Frank Madafferi intends one last bid to overturn ecstasy seizure conviction
Jailed Calabrian mafia boss Frank Madafferi intends to base a last attempt to overturn his conviction over Australia’s biggest ecstasy seizure on the Lawyer X informer scandal.
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Jailed Calabrian mafia boss Frank Madafferi intends to base a last attempt to overturn his conviction over Australia’s biggest ecstasy seizure on the Lawyer X informer scandal.
Madafferi has already claimed that an intellectual disability and poor English left him unable to properly instruct his lawyer during his drug trafficking trial in 2014.
The Calabrian-born fruiterer has six years of a 10-year jail term to serve, after which he faces deportation to Italy.
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But he wants to stay and is waiting to see how appeals pan out for ecstasy smuggling co-accused Rob Karam and syndicate head Pasquale Barbaro.
Appeals are possible in the cases of the 32 people who were convicted over the smuggling of the ecstasy, which was hidden in a shipment of tinned tomatoes from Naples, because Lawyer X was involved in an elaborate police sting that led to the tapping of phones belonging to senior members of the syndicate.
Only four senior members of the syndicate are known to have dealt with Lawyer X.
But it will be argued that evidence was obtained improperly and that all of the trials were affected by the fruit of the “poisoned tree”.
In an affidavit, Karam says in 2008, a week after the then world-record ecstasy shipment arrived on the docks, Lawyer X approached him and led him into meetings with the syndicate, particularly Barbaro and veteran criminal John Higgs.
Lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, acting for Karam, says the 20 people to whom the Director of Public Prosecutions has now written, advising them that Victoria Police’s use of Lawyer X as an informer may undermine their convictions, were the “tip of the iceberg”.
Lawyer X has said she was behind the arrests of, and charges against, at least 386 people.
Madafferi has faced deportation before but got a reprieve in 2005 when his visa cancellation was overturned by then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone, following lobbying by his elder brother, Tony Madafferi, and friend and former lawyer, Joseph Acquaro.
Mr Acquaro himself was shot dead in March 2016.
Another to launch an appeal over the Lawyer X scandal is Faruk Orman, convicted in 2009 of being killer Andrew “Benji” Veniamin’s getaway driver in the gangland murder of Victor Peirce in Bay St, Port Melbourne, in 2002.
Orman, who is serving a 14-year minimum term, was an associate of Mick Gatto, who was acquitted of Veniamin’s 2004 murder on self-defence grounds.
Lawyer X, who appeared for Orman, condensed voluminous evidence for trial. Senior counsel
Robert Richter, QC, raised concern about some evidence in the case relating to Orman’s past. It’s not known to what degree Lawyer X could have tainted the case.
Drug trafficker Philip Batticciotto, serving 10 years in jail over a 2008 plot to ship 100kg of pseudoephedrine, is also appealing
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