Coca-Cola gunman walks free despite high risk of reoffending

OVER 20 years, Adriano Manna did what he pleased. This is the shocking final twist in one of Australia’s most notorious crime stories.

ON the 17th of February, 1997, less than two months after being released from prison, convicted criminal Adriano Manna shot Coca-Cola delivery driver Craig Pareezer five times in front of his wife and seven-year-old son.

Now he is out of prison again.

A Supreme Court ruling last month has allowed Manna to be released despite a plea by authorities to keep him in custody as a high risk offender and despite the fact he has repeatedly reoffended shortly after getting out of jail.

Just weeks before the shooting, the 23-year-old had been serving time for, among other things, threatening his mother with a knife, smashing his father’s windscreen and possessing a sawn-off shotgun. He was released on parole on December 30 and discharged from parole a month later.

It was 18 days later that Manna shot Mr Pareezer during a botched robbery as he tried to refill Coke vending machines at Werrington TAFE.

The beloved Western Sydney truck driver had taken his wife and son for moral support because he had been bashed and robbed during the same delivery 18 months ago. This was his first trip back.

As he removed the money box from one machine and went to his truck to get more cans, he was confronted by Manna holding a pistol and demanding money. After Pareezer told him he did not have the keys to the safe Manna shot him in the chest and when he fell to the ground he shot him another four times in the chest, jaw, arm and leg.

Mr Pareezer’s seven-year-old son watched it happen.

Paramedics and police at Werrington College TAFE campus following the shooting of delivery driver Craig Pareezer.

Mr Pareezer receiving treatment at the scene.

Yet miraculously, Mr Pareezer survived. His wife said from his hospital bedside after the incident: “This fellow’s a cat. He’s got nine lives.”

The crime electrified Sydney. The judge at the time described it as an “intentional, deliberate and cold-blooded attempt to kill”. After being convicted of attempted murder, Manna was sentenced to 20 years jail. Two years into his sentence he punched another inmate in the head, twice.

And 10 years after his conviction, while he was still behind bars, police publicly named him as one of 22 faces of organised bikie crime, linking him to the Comanchero motorcycle gang.

Then-NSW police minister David Campbell told The Sunday Telegraph in 2007: “These are the faces of criminals who have sought to hide behind bikie clubs to conduct their illegal activities.”

Even so, he was released on parole in 2012. Less than a year and a half later he had committed larceny and less than two months after that he committed common assault, malicious damage and larceny again. He also had an apprehended domestic violence order taken out against him that same year.

Adriano Manna in undated copy photo, from the Comanchero bikie gang.

He was returned to custody on July 18, 2014, but was set to be freed in February this year.

The State of NSW vigorously opposed his release, seeking a “high risk violent offender continuing detention order” that would keep him behind bars for another 12 months.

Yet despite Manna’s clear and repeated history of reoffending after being released from jail, the Supreme Court rejected this, instead releasing him under an extended supervision order. Part of the condition is that he resides with his father Sammy Manna, who was mentioned several times by the Trade Union Royal Commission as a senior official of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.

The connection came to light because during his last time out of prison Adriano Manna was hired by building industry figure George Alex in what was reported as an attempt by the construction boss to win the favour of the powerful CFMEU.

Meanwhile, Mr Pareezer and his family were fighting their own battles.

Days after his shooting, Coca-Cola took the extraordinary step of painting its delivery trucks white to disguise them, amid fears they were being targeted by crooks.

In the years that followed Mr Pareezer made national headlines by suing the soft drink giant, winning an almost $3 million compensation claim against the company in 2004.

Craig Pareezer (L) with his family after winning his initial compensation case against Coca-Cola in 2004. Picture: Nathan Edwards

However Coca-Cola Amatil appealed the decision and in 2006, it won. A court ordered Mr Pareezer to pay back the $560,000 he had already received, sending the then 41-year-old and his family into financial ruin. The outrage was palpable.

After a massive backlash, including a call for Coke to back off by then-NSW premier Morris Iemma, Coca-Cola abandoned any plans to recover the money.

Mr Pareezer said it was the first time the company had contacted him in the nine years since he had been shot while restocking its machines.

Then, last year, came the final battle. Craig Pareezer died peacefully in his home after a struggle with cancer.

However Mr Pareezer was left devastated after the Coca-Cola appealed the decision and won in 2006.

For a man who had once been a national champion — an impossible survivor of a brutal crime who became a David to a corporate Goliath — his final fight slipped by unnoticed by the public.

Indeed, after a lifetime of making headlines, the only press to record Craig Pareezer’s passing was Prime Mover magazine, which remembered him as a deeply beloved member of the trucking community who always put friendship first.

Tellingly, the crime that defined him to the rest of the nation was not even mentioned. While the public knew him only as a victim or a hero, those around him remembered him only as a good man.

“Craig considered everyone he met first and foremost as a friend,” his mate Paul Illmer said.

Now that man has left us. He was just 51 years old.

And one year later the man who tried to kill him walked free from prison, aged 43, despite the court admitting that he “poses an unacceptable risk of committing a serious violence offence if he is not kept under supervision”.

Whether or not the supervision imposed by the court is sufficient to protect the community we can now only wait and see.

Let us hope it doesn’t take another Craig Pareezer to find out.