How George Marrogi orchestrated colossal drug deals from inside Barwon Prison

As the world learnt to do business remotely during the pandemic, so did George Marrogi. The difference? The drug kingpin was inside one of Australia’s highest security prisons.

No one could accuse George Marrogi of being a backward business thinker.

As the world learned to do business remotely via Zoom during the Covid lockdown era, so did Marrogi.

The difference was that Marrogi was inside the walls of maximum security Barwon Prison, in the early stages of a long jail term for the 2016 murder of Kadir Ors at Campbellfield.

There, he orchestrated colossal drug deals and allegedly commissioned violent crimes against his enemies.

Unlike other prisoners, he had round-the-clock phone access and used the trick of phoning a number fraudulently registered to a legal office to reach those on the outside.

When there was business to be discussed, Marrogi demanded involvement.

His girlfriend Antonietta Mannella would on occasions summon other syndicate members to the family’s sprawling property in Cranesbill Lane, Mickleham, known to them as “The Farm”.

The group – with George on speaker – would gather to talk through any pressing issues in the same way as the rest of us did during that period.

“George was a control freak,” detective Sergeant Nathan Toey of Operation Steelers said.

“He needed to know everything that was going on. He needed to be part of it.”

As with every boss, he wanted to see results.

A 2021 search of his prison cell found a USB stick containing an image of $10m of NCF profits tied with rubber-bands and neatly laid out.

The outside arm of the syndicate, meanwhile, was buying up big, cleaning millions and setting up big loans with false documents, Sergeant Toey said.

Investigators identified syndicate members who had never submitted a tax return and had no apparent income were paying big money for property.

Sergeant Toey said the next step was to work out who was facilitating those purchases and the companies aligned to those acquisitions.

This was also a world where cash was king.

A search of Marrogi’s prison cell found a USB stick containing an image of $10m of NCF profits tied with rubber-bands and neatly laid out.

One senior NCF operative repeatedly used his sons and nephews to funnel cash drops of between $50,000 and $100,000 into automatic teller machines.

Those went into that man’s business account as part of the process of laundering Marrogi’s drug millions.

One of the sons is suspected of pumping $5m into ATMs where it was directed to a range of business names.

It was a key element in cleaning money which was used to accumulate a colossal array of assets, most of which are now in the hands of authorities.

The assets confiscation work was critical, detective Inspector Graham Banks of the Echo taskforce said, hurting the gangs in a way that arrests and prison sentences against those at the top could not.

“If you don’t take the assets, the rest of them are left with nice houses and nice cars,” he said.