Frank Costa stared down death threats and bribes in fight against Calabrian mafia extortion racket
The Geelong legend refused a $1m a year bribe and stared down death threats in a battle against the Calabrian mafia’s fruit and veg racket.
Geelong Football Club legend Frank Costa is one of the few people in the world to have taken on the Calabrian mafia and won.
He did so at the request of trucking magnate Lindsay Fox and the then Coles chairman Solomon Lew.
Mr Costa, who died on Sunday, aged 83, told the Herald Sun in 2006 that Mr Fox and Mr Lew approached him in 1990 and asked him to help them end a Calabrian mafia-run 50-cents-a-case extortion racket.
A Coles executive later told police the mafia tax was costing Coles about $5 million a year.
Mr Costa said Mr Fox and Mr Lew had become aware of the long-running scam and were determined to stop it.
“Those two men were telling me, ‘Mate, you have got to fix things up for us. You’ve got to clean it up’,” Mr Costa told the Herald Sun in 2006.
The mafia-imposed levy on every case of fruit and vegetables going out of Melbourne’s wholesale market had been forced on suppliers for decades.
It meant Victorians were buying produce at artificially inflated prices.
The biggest buyers from the wholesale markets were Coles and Safeway and they didn’t want to deal with lots of small suppliers and would only buy from preferred suppliers.
It was worth a lot of money to be a Coles or Safeway preferred supplier.
Senior Melbourne mafioso figures were the middlemen, bribing the supermarket buyers to use only preferred suppliers who paid a 50-cent-a-case levy directly to the Calabrian mafia.
The preferred suppliers were guaranteed bulk sales every day, the supermarket buyers were happy with kickbacks and the Calabrian mafia lined its pockets with millions of dollars a year.
Calabria is in the toe of southern Italy and is the world headquarters of the Italian organised crime gang, ‘Ndrangheta. ‘Ndrangheta is known by some Italians as L’Onorata Societa (the Honoured Society) or La Famiglia (The Family).
It is simply called the mafia by most in Australia, or the Calabrian mafia to differentiate it from the Sicilian mafia.
‘Ndrangheta eclipsed the Sicilian mafia in the 1990s to become the most powerful crime syndicate in Italy.
The Calabrian mafia ran Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable markets for decades.
Various members of the Costa family, including former Geelong Football Club President Frank Costa and his younger brother Anthony, were threatened after bravely deciding to take a stand against the Calabrian mafia’s 50-cents-a-case extortion racket.
The Geelong-based Costa Group was one of Australia’s largest wholesale fruit and vegetable suppliers.
Frank Costa told the Herald Sun in 2006 that Mr Fox and Mr Lew came to him for help in 1990.
“They were on the board at the time. They said ‘Get in there and speak to Geoff Sadler’.”
Geoff Sadler was a senior Coles executive at the time and later became managing director of the Coles general merchandise division, as well as a Saint Kilda Football Club director.
“So I was talking with Geoff Sadler, and he said to me ‘Frank, we know we have got a problem. We want you to come and help us fix it but we have got to wait until we get the right state manager for you to work with. Someone with enough strength to be able to cope with the challenge’,” Frank Costa said.
“Everybody was nervous. They said they would give me a ring as soon as they had found somebody.”
Coles did appoint a new state manager to work with the Costa Group to try to break the grip the Calabrian mafia had on Victoria’s multimillion-dollar a year fresh produce industry.
A decision was made that the Costa Group would start supplying about 30 per cent of the fruit and vegetable needs of Coles from September 1990.
Word soon spread at the Melbourne market that the Costa Group was about to get a hefty slice of Coles business – and the Calabrian mafia wasn’t happy about it.
“We had rented some space near the market. About two or three weeks before we were due to start it got set on fire one Sunday night,” Frank Costa said.
“It was huge. The place was burning like crazy. We lost a lot of our records.
“That was the first warning.
“The second warning was a week or two later, a week before we actually started our Coles distribution centre. The Coles distribution centre manager was arriving for work about 6 or 7 in the morning. When he got out of his car he got hit by two blokes.
“The two blokes belted the living daylights out of him and he was carted off to hospital – that was the second warning.”
The third warning that the Calabrian mafia was not happy about the Costa Group and Coles trying to break up an extortion racket that had been in operation for almost 30 years came in December 1990, soon after the Costa Group started supplying Coles with 30 per cent of its fresh produce.
John Vasilopoulos, who was state manager for fresh produce at Coles, was enjoying a night in at his Ivanhoe home when his front doorbell rang about 10.30pm.
He at first didn’t open the door, simply calling out “Who’s there?”, but did open it slightly after hearing a voice say: “Open the door John”.
He was then shotgun blasted twice in what police later described as a classic kneecapping. Mr Vasilopoulos had shotgun pellets removed from his knees, thighs, stomach, chest and arms.
Investigating the Calabrian mafia extortion racket had recently become one of Mr Vasilopoulos’s tasks.
“He was physically hurt, but it also shattered him mentally,” Frank Costa told the Herald Sun in 2006.
“I got a phone call from Geoff Sadler the next morning and I came up from Geelong to see he and another Coles executive.
“They told me what had happened, and they were really upset that one of their guys had been shot like that.
“They asked me if I was prepared to take over all the supply of fruit and vegetables to Coles, knowing the challenge it would be.
“I looked them straight in the eye and said if I had their support I would do it.
“I said ‘I am prepared to put myself and my senior guys on the line, but I will need your support’ and they told me they would give me that support.”
The mafia offered Mr Costa a bribe to go along with their lucrative extortion racket — $1 million cash a year for life.
But Mr Costa bravely hit back when a senior mafia figure gave him two choices.
``Those choices were $1 million in cash each year, and if that didn’t appeal to me the other offer was a bullet and that would be delivered post haste,’’ Mr Costa said.
``I’m no hero, but I do know you fight fire with fire,’’ Mr Costa said.
He told brother Anthony to go back to the Calabrian mafia identity with a warning.
“I told him, I will never forget the conversation, and it was probably unfair of me because he was the guy that was facing the fellow and not me, I said ‘You go back and tell him that if one hair of any of my family is touched at all he will get double that back in return to his family – whatever that might be’,” Frank Costa said.
“Now I wouldn’t know where to start finding somebody to go and do that sort of thing, but he doesn’t know that.
“It worked. He backed off.”
Frank Costa said the Coles buyers who allowed the Calabrian mafia extortion racket to flourish for so long were also Italian and that they did so because of massive cash payments provided to them by the mafia.
“They were paying these blokes an absolute bloody fortune under the table,” he said.
“So they might have been getting $50,000 or more a year paid by Coles, but they would be getting three, four times that in the meantime – tax free.”
Frank Costa said supermarket chains, including Coles and Safeway, had known about the extortion racket for years and had basically decided to reluctantly put up with it because doing so was easier, and safer, than taking on the Calabrian mafia.
He said it had been going on since the 1960s, resulting in Victorians paying much more for their fruit and vegetables than they should for decades.
“It was a system they couldn’t break at the market, that was the only way they could operate,” he said.
It took more than two years for the combined determination of Coles bosses, including Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew – who hired private detectives to try to get evidence against the extortionists – and the Costa brothers to break the back of the Calabrian mafia extortion racket.
Probing in the market by the homicide squad after the 1992 murder of mafia figure Alfonso Muratore also helped highlight and stifle the racket.
Victoria Police homicide squad detectives Peter Halloran and Geoff Beanland spoke to Coles board members Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew following Muratore’s murder. Both provided police with statements on Dec 11, 1992.
“I have been asked questions in relation to activities conducted in the Footscray Market and connections to Coles Myer,” Mr Fox’s statement to police said.
“I have no involvement in criminal activities which are allegedly occurring within the market.
“If I come into possession of documents or information, I am only too willing to assist police.”
Mr Lew also offered to help detectives Halloran and Beanland in any way he could and said he had no involvement in “criminal activities which are allegedly occurring within the market or otherwise”.
Frank Costa told the Herald Sun in September 2006 that he believed the extortion racket was well and truly over, although he couldn’t be sure a few supermarket buyers were not still accepting cash in return for buying from particular stallholders.
He confirmed some of the Calabrian mafia figures involved in the 50-cents-a-case levy were still heavily involved in the Melbourne market.
“Father Time has removed some of them out of the place,” Mr Costa said.
Originally published as Frank Costa stared down death threats and bribes in fight against Calabrian mafia extortion racket
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