One was a wily, rat-cunning drug trafficker with decades of experience. He was also a high-ranking member of one of Australia’s most notorious mafia families.

The other was a petty criminal with an expensive drug habit. The pair were not strangers, but neither were they close. The connection was cemented only by money.

Their meeting, in mid-2016 at an Adelaide cafe, was the genesis of a major cannabis trafficking operation that would run for almost two years until police uncovered it. During that period, hydroponically grown cannabis worth many millions of dollars was shipped from Adelaide to Darwin by the syndicate.

The man calling the shots was certainly no stranger to police. Guiseppe “Joe” Romeo has been the target of many, many police operations Australia-wide over the past four decades.

Just like his father, notorious drug trafficker Bruno “The Fox” Romeo – who was one of the nation’s most powerful mafia figures until his death in 2016 – Joe Romeo is a career criminal who has been a longstanding, major player in Australia’s illicit drug industry.

The Romeo clan is one of a handful of mafia families with whom almost every Australian police agency has been battling since cannabis-growing became a lucrative industry in the 1960s.

The criminal record of Joe Romeo, 65, dates back to the early 1980s and includes convictions for heroin dealing, large-scale cannabis cultivation, dishonesty and firearms offences.

In contrast, the man recruited by Romeo in his trafficking venture was virtually a criminal nobody. Basil Contos was a petty crook who simply needed cash to fund his own drug habit. Although they were associates, his loyalty to Romeo extended no further than that, as the drug kingpin would eventually find out.

It’s no secret that hydroponic cannabis cultivation is one of South Australia’s booming underground industries.

The huge, relatively easy to detect outdoor crops of several thousand plants that Joe Romeo’s late father specialised in have been replaced by highly organised syndicates that operate dozens of grow houses across Adelaide’s suburbs.

Collectively, the grow houses produce tonnes of potent, hydroponically grown cannabis worth far more than the poor quality outdoor plants that were once the mainstay of the cannabis trade. A bonus is that if police uncover one grow house because of a nosy neighbour, the others remain intact and the operation does not miss a beat. The cannabis that Joe Romeo was moving came from one such local syndicate.

His operation was far from sophisticated. Hidden in plain sight, it was basic and effective.

Not long after their 2016 meeting, Romeo provided Contos with a hire car and 9.5kg of packaged cannabis to transport to Darwin. Romeo also organised for another 7kg of cannabis to be shipped to Darwin using Toll freight delivery and advised Contos when to collect it from Darwin’s East Arm freight terminal.

Contos carried out these instructions and was told who to deliver the cannabis to and collect the $70,000 cash payment

For an unknown reason, perhaps the fact it was the first run of the new operation, Romeo flew to Darwin and collected the cash from Contos personally. While he was there, he rented an apartment for Contos and a storage shed at the Frances Bay wharf as the base for the operation.

Every fortnight over the next 17 months, Romeo would book a large cardboard box on the Greyhound express bus service from Adelaide to Darwin. The crudely sealed box contained 9kg of vacuum packed packages of cannabis. Contos would collect the box, repackage the cannabis into smaller lots and sell it to individuals nominated by Romeo at $3800 a pound.

Contos was paid $400 a pound for his trouble, guaranteeing Romeo $3400 a pound. (Drug traffickers sell cannabis in pounds, rather than by metric kilogram, which is 2.2 pounds.)

Contos would either deposit the cash into an account nominated by Romeo – in sums of less than $10,000 to avoid the transaction being reported – or send the cash to him in Adelaide in packages on the Greyhound express.

Always alert for ambush by police, Romeo would use a female associate to collect the cash from the delivery dock at the Franklin St bus station.

As is often the case in criminal enterprises, the participants often fall out. In November 2017, Contos and Romeo had a dispute over money from the sale of the cannabis. They parted company and Romeo engaged the services of another associate he knew from the drug trade in Adelaide, career criminal James Weston, 52.

Just like Romeo, Weston was well known to SA police. Also known as Rodney James Stanley, he has been the target in a long-running Major Crime Investigation Branch operation into three unsolved drug murders in Adelaide since 1998.

In 1999, Weston – along with his father Geoffrey James Stanley – was charged with one of the murders but the charge was later withdrawn.

The body of the victim, a fellow drug dealer, has never been found but is believed to have been dumped at sea.

Just as Contos had, Weston ran the receiving and distribution end from a rented apartment – once again paid for by Romeo – in the middle class Darwin suburb of Marrara. The operation never missed a beat, with the shipments continuing every fortnight.

But just a month later, Romeo’s luck would drastically change. In policing, good intelligence is worth its weight in gold. And unfortunately for Romeo, his and Weston’s activities had come to the attention of SAPOL’s Drug and Organised Crime Investigation Branch as part of Operation Defy, another cannabis trafficking investigation it was running.

With the fight against organised crime meticulously co-ordinated across Australia’s law enforcement agencies, it took little time for the NT Joint Organised Crime Task Force to launch its own operation, Jackfish, to target Romeo’s trafficking enterprise.

For the next three months, Weston and Romeo were oblivious to the fact their every move was being covertly watched and their phone calls listened to.

The intricate surveillance operation followed the fortnightly shipments and unmasked others involved in the venture at lower levels.

Armed with a mountain of evidence, Operation Jackfish moved into its overt phase on March 1, 2018, with a series of raids across Darwin in which search warrants were executed on Weston’s apartments and his those of his accomplices.

While the task force already had a wealth of evidence against the syndicate, the contents of Weston’s apartment was a veritable goldmine.

The haul included nine kilograms of cannabis, more than $70,000 in cash, electronic scales and an electronic cash counter that had been purchased because of the sheer volume of cash the enterprise was generating.

One of the more valuable items seized was a sales ledger that detailed the extensive transactions with various dealers the syndicate had been supplying.

With Weston in custody, Contos and finally Romeo were arrested and charged over the operation.

While the evidence against those involved was overwhelming, the nail in Romeo’s coffin came when both Contos and Weston rolled over and made full confessions about their roles and his actions.

Task force detectives also collected a significant amount of material that corroborated the confessions of Contos and Weston.

It included shipping records from Greyhound Express, flight and hire car records, bank accounts records and CCTV footage from various locations around Darwin.

Faced with such an insurmountable prosecution case, Romeo realised he had little choice but to plead guilty to taking part in the supply of a commercial quantity of cannabis, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in the NT.

While Romeo admitted to transporting at least 300kg of cannabis and receiving $1.8 million in payment over the 21 months the operation went undetected, police suspect both the quantity and the proceeds were significantly higher given the frequency of the shipments.

NT police Drug and Organised crime chief Detective Superintendent Kerry Hosking said while police were aware of the syndicate was large, the brazen nature of it was a surprise.

“People employ all sorts of methods to prevent detection and some of the concealment methods can be quite sophisticated, but simply transporting drugs by Greyhound bus wasn’t one of the more sophisticated methods we have seen,’’ she said.

“There was probably a gap in the market up here for supply and they have taken advantage of that.

“Even though it is a smaller market, they do not need to move much because of the price of the drug up here sadly.’’

Federal police Darwin Superintendent Matthew Ballard said the operation was the largest of its type ever encountered in the NT.

“From what we understand, Romeo had links to the NT going back a long way,’’ he said.

“He’s known for a long time there was an opportunity, a good market here for cannabis and they capitalised on that.

“There were a lot of customers. Larger amounts were being broken down into smaller quantities and we believe these were transported across the NT, including our remote indigenous communities.’’

Supt. Ballard said each jurisdiction involved in the operation examined where the cash generated by Romeo ended up and if any of his assets could be seized.

“The assets were quite well hidden. We worked with our partners to seize $149,000 in cash and a number of vehicles,” he said.

He said the operation proved the benefits of the collaboration between the agencies in the six-strong JOCTF – NT police, Australian Federal Police, Border Force, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Home Affairs – to effectively combat organised crime and cause maximum damage to the criminal environment.

“The NT is not immune from these types of serious criminal endeavours,’’ Supt. Ballard said.

“Cannabis is often used by organised crime syndicates to generate cash which is then used to import and produce other border controlled drugs like methamphetamines.’’

In sentencing Romeo on January 6 Justice Judith Kelly noted the quantity of cannabis was the largest that had ever been imported into the NT and the impact the drug had on users – particularly in Aboriginal communities.

“Given your history of offending ... I do not think it can be said that your prospects of rehabilitation are very good,’’ Justice Kelly told Romeo.

She told Romeo if it had not been for his guilty plea, she would have given him a head sentence of 13 years, but she instead ordered he serve nine years with a non-parole period of six years and four months.

For their roles in the operation – and their co-operation with police – Contos and West both received discounted sentences of five years with non-parole periods of two-and-a-half years.

While they may have avoided lengthy prison terms by ratting on Romeo, the downside is they will now spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder.

Co-offenders including Weston’s former partner Leanne Haley, 51, also of Adelaide and Darwin grandmother Yasmin Powell, 57, who was also romantically involved with Weston, received lesser sentences for assisting Weston.

Haley’s sentence was wholly suspended and Powell’s was partially suspended.

Surprisingly, Romeo will serve his prison sentence in a South Australian prison.

He applied for the prisoner transfer because his most of his extended family live in Adelaide, including his elderly mother who is ill.

As with all mafia clans, family is everything.