Ex cop claims late Geelong businessman Frank Costa was targeted for hit

The late Geelong Cats legend and fruit and vegetable tycoon, Frank Costa, was on the hit list of a notorious gangland figure, a former Victoria Police officer has revealed.

Frank Costa was enmeshed in the fight against corruption in Melbourne’s fruit and vegetable industry.

Gangland triggerman Victor Peirce once plotted to kill business tycoon Frank Costa, a former Victoria Police officer says.

Ex-detective Brian Murphy said he met with fresh produce industry giant Mr Costa in the 1990s and told him of the threat to his life.

He said he did not tell Mr Costa – who was at the time fighting mafia infiltration of the industry – that Peirce was the man who was out to get him.

Mr Murphy said the information was credible and had come via an informer.

Gangster Victor Peirce.

Businessman Frank Costa.

At the time, Mr Costa was deeply enmeshed in the fight against corruption in Melbourne’s

fruit and vegetable industry.

“I told him someone was going to knock (kill) him,” Mr Murphy told the Herald Sun.

“I think he took it very seriously.”

Peirce was also heavily involved in the fruit and vegetable sphere, but only in a sinister way.

In the 1990s, he was well known for doing extortion work for Italian organised crime figures preying on the industry.

He was busted firing a machinegun at the back of the old Footscray fruit and vegetable market in 1992.

Victor Peirce in 1989. Picture: Jay Town

Detective Sgt Peter De Santo told a court in that year that Peirce was a “standover figure” at the market.

“He was employed to ensure a percentage was paid to various persons within the market system for the free-and-easy travel of goods to and from growers to wholesalers,” Sgt De Santo told Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.

Mr Costa was known as the man who stood up to the mafia as it made millions by forcibly taking 50 cents for every case of fruit and veg sold.

Even giants like Coles and Safeway paid the racket rather than risk the wrath of its organised crime architects, who had a track record of eliminating those who got in their way at the markets.

Frank Costa built a fruit and vegetable empire after standing up to the mafia.

Mr Costa and Coles eventually circumvented the mafia, resulting in shootings, property destruction and beatings.

At one stage, a death threat was issued through his younger brother Anthony.

“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,” Frank Costa later recalled.

“And we’d start with that guy’s family first. You have to bluff them – and it worked.”

Mr Costa died last year.

Peirce’s underworld connections were strong, despite the infamy over his suspected involvement in the 1988 murders of police officers Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre in Walsh St, South Yarra.

He was a guest at Carl and Roberta Williams’ wedding according to an insider’s police statement and was a heavy for Melbourne’s Calabrian mafia.

Peirce was a hired bodyguard and ‘’fix-it’’ man for mob boss Frank Benvenuto and was often seen at the Footscray markets.

Benvenuto was almost certainly shot by another underworld figure on his payroll, Andrew ‘’Benji’’ Veniamin.

The motive behind Benvenuto’s execution in May, 2000, remains unclear, but sources have told the Herald Sun it was linked to another murder 12 months earlier of fruiterer Joseph Quadara.

Ultimately, the killing of Benvenuto set in motion a fallout between Peirce and Veniamin.

Benvenuto was on the phone to Peirce at the time he was shot.

Within two years Peirce, on May 1, 2002, was killed in a similar hit – sitting behind the wheel of his car in Bay St, Port Melbourne.