A 'FAMILY' REUNION TO FEAR

An Italian prosecutor tells Nick McKenzie it is time Australian police woke
up to the Mafia menace in their midst.

MANY of the towns scattered across the picturesque region of Calabria in
southern Italy seem frozen in time. Local dialects spill from ancient
shopfronts and, while cars have mostly replaced carts, the streets are
still lined with cobblestones.

Another tradition is that the Calabrian Mafia, known as the " 'Ndrangheta"
or "Honoured Society", frustrates the authorities and the Government. So it
was something of a coup when, about four years ago, an undercover operative
infiltrated the Mancuso family, as part of an investigation codenamed
Operation Decollo. As the evidence grew, so did the belief of Italian
investigators that they stood a good chance of crushing one of Calabria's
leading crime syndicates.

But even more remarkable was what they learned about the global reach of
their targets. In early 2004, an Italian judge issued documents ordering
the arrest of more than 100 individuals. Scattered among residences in
Europe and South America were addresses in Kew, Rowville and Mildura, and
the names of men the Italian authorities allege are involved in a plan to
smuggle up to 500 kilograms of cocaine into the Port of Melbourne.

Italian authorities are, once again, fingering Australia as a significant
site in the operations of the Calabrian Mafia. While such a view has been
played down by Australian investigators, revelations that Operation Decollo
arrest warrants for a handful of Australians have been outstanding for more
than two years are raising concerns that authorities here may have shifted
their sights too far away from Italo-Australian crime syndicates.

A report released 18 months ago by Italy's Interior Ministry singled out
Australia and Canada as overseas locations where the 'Ndrangheta is most
"active and involved in trans-national criminal activity". The report also
claimed the organisation is the most "internationally dangerous" of Italy's
Mafia groups. Earlier this week in Calabria, police arrested an Honoured
Society member suspected of murdering the deputy president of the region's
parliament.

Not surprisingly, when The Age first met Calabrian anti-Mafia prosecutor Dr
Salvatore Curcio in Rome last year, he was accompanied by a bodyguard.
Curcio is a key figure in Operation Decollo, an investigation he says has
been able to penetrate the blood ties, strict hierarchy and code of silence
that characterises the Honoured Society.

But for the sharply dressed and slightly paunchy lawyer, Operation Decollo
is a job unfinished. The Age revealed earlier this week that for more than
a year, Curcio has been seeking the extradition of at least four
Australians whose arrest was ordered by a Calabrian court in 2004.

"Operation Decollo has ascertained the existence of solid links between the
organisation dedicated to international drug trafficking based in Calabria
and one of its arms in Australian territory," he says.

The first hints that the Calabrian Mafia once again had its eyes on
Australia came when Italian authorities and the Australian Federal Police
realised they had separately investigated the same drug importation
involving Italian-born Adelaide man Pietro Antonio Cerullo. In 2000, he was
charged by Australian police with possessing 317 kilograms of cocaine that
had been shipped from Colombia to Australia, and in 2004 he was sentenced
to 20 years' jail. But what alarmed investigators, apart from the huge
amount of cocaine seized (according to Italian authorities, an additional
130 kilograms still made it through to the Australian market) was a visit
to Adelaide by a Calabrian to meet Cerullo before his arrest.

To most, Vincenzo Barbieri would have passed for just another European
tourist. But back home, investigators had him placed in the "upper
echelons" of one of the local Honoured Society clans and as a key target of
Operation Decollo. In early 2002, 18 months after Cerullo's arrest in
Adelaide, Italian police began secretly recording phone calls between
Barbieri and a man living in Rowville, in Melbourne's outer east.

The Victorian on the phone to Barbieri was Nicola Ciconte, the son of
Calabrian migrants who settled in Wonthaggi in southern Gippsland in 1955.
After completing a tool-making apprenticeship, Ciconte moved into finance,
first as an insurance salesman and then as a broker.

Ciconte first aroused the interest of the AFP when, in 1999, it began
investigating his role in a scam to defraud the government of millions of
dollars in cigarette import tax. He was charged in 2001 and jailed in March
last year for 12 months. But according to Curcio, in the months after that
first brush with the law, Ciconte was busy forging a close relationship
with Barbieri.

"There were feverish contacts recorded, especially during 2002, 2003 and
the first months of 2004, between this Australian component and the
Italian let's call it 'mother' organisation," Curcio says. Italian court
documents provide more details, outlining a plan to "import into Australian
territory enormous quantities of cocaine".

The men's planning also included the organisation of a dry run. In 2002, a
shipping container successfully made its way from Italy to Melbourne.
Curcio alleges that Ciconte also intended to apply his financial training
to the venture.

"What we've been able to establish from the documentation seized at the
home and at the company of the (Italian) defendants, was that the money was
being laundered, sent to Italy from Australia," he says.

But Ciconte's relationship with Barbieri became strained after the
Australian failed to deliver on numerous promises, including the delivery
of money to Italy. There were questions raised in Australia about why
Barbieri was persisting with Ciconte, given the high stakes of the venture.
Italian investigators replied that Ciconte had the right connections back
in Calabria.

In January 2004, after Italian authorities decided they had enough evidence
to lay charges, Decollo officials co-ordinated a series of raids across the
globe. Barbieri was arrested and, in May last year, sentenced to 18 years
in prison.

It was envisaged that similar arrests would be made worldwide. Indeed, the
Italian police were told by their Australian counterparts that this would
happen. But when the AFP sent their evidence to the Commonwealth Director
of Public Prosecutions, it's believed the DPP decided the case would be too
confusing to present to a jury. Not even an offer from Curcio to send his
critical undercover operative to Australia to testify would sway the DPP.

Meanwhile, the Court of Catanzaro in Calabria had already issued arrest
warrants naming Ciconte and three of his associates Mildura man Vincenzo
Medici, Melbourne man Michael Calleja and South Australian Carmelo Loprete.

"The trips that these men took to Italy were filmed, the telephone calls
and conversations were intercepted, so we were able to supply the judge's
office with (evidence) that these people were involved in this
international trafficking of cocaine," Curcio says. "We requested the
activation of international procedures of extradition."

Just how far the extradition request has progressed is unclear. Earlier
this week, an AFP spokeswoman said she could not comment on the details of
the case and that extradition requests were a matter for the Federal
Attorney-General's department. A spokesman for Justice Minister Chris
Ellison refused to answer questions about what action, if any, the
Government had undertaken in relation to a possible extradition request.

However, it is believed that the Italian Government has yet to detail all
of its evidence to the AFP or to send Australia the information required to
initiate an extradition request.

Whatever the reason, it means the Australians wanted in Italy are at
liberty; Nicola Ciconte walked free from prison just over a week ago, after
finishing a 12-month sentence for fraud and failing to answer questions
before the Australian Crime Commission.

While the outstanding warrants may say more about the difficulty of
international investigations than the Mafia's Australian activities, the
role of the Honoured Society, in what would have been one of the nation's
biggest cocaine importations, is hard to ignore.

Italian investigators still refer to the findings of Australia's most
public exploration of the Honoured Society, the Woodward Royal Commission,
which concluded more than two decades ago. It named several Australian
residents as organisation members and highlighted their involvement in the
murder of Griffith furniture maker and anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay.

However, the most recent major investigation into the state of Italian
organised crime came up with a rather different finding. In 1995, the
National Crime Authority's Operation Cerberus declared an Honoured Society
in Australia was more myth than reality and that "Italo-Australian
organised crime" was declining.

Former chairman of the NCA John Broome says those findings were based on
sound analysis. But he also says the resulting shift of state and federal
police resources away from such organised crime went too far. "If they
think law enforcement is looking somewhere else, they will inevitably try
to utilise that capacity to get on the blind side of the police," he said
this week.

Broome also believes the focus on terrorism is coming at a cost.

"There is absolutely no doubt that drug trafficking in Australia still
causes far more damage to far more Australians than all the terrorist acts
that have been contemplated let alone carried out in Australia in the
last 10 years, and yet the resources of the AFP (and) the resources of
state police forces are now being largely directed towards the terrorist
threat, perceived or real. It's a response to a political assessment as
much as to a law enforcement assessment," he says.

The experiences of the NSW Crime Commission add some weight to Broome's
analysis. Its annual report of 2003-04 refers to an investigation into
"large-scale outdoor cannabis cultivation by identities associated with
Italo-Australian organised crime". The report further notes "the Italian
organised crime network has received relatively little law enforcement
attention over the past decade, yet continues to generate substantial wealth".

AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty declined a request to be interviewed for this
article, although earlier this week he dismissed criticism about the AFP's
resourcing. He also confined the AFP's link to Operation Decollo to a
failure to gain enough evidence to sustain charges.

In his recently released book Undercover, former Victoria Police detective
Damian Marrett describes his 1992 infiltration of a drugs syndicate in
Mildura headed by local man Matteo Rosario Medici. More than a decade
later, Matteo Medici's brother, Vincenzo, is one of those listed on
Operation Decollo's arrest warrants. The brothers have long attracted the
attention of authorities, as had their father, Marco Medici snr, until his
murder on the family's Mildura property in the early '80s.

"Like anything, as the strong roots die it's going to get weaker and
weaker," said Marrett in a recent interview. "But I think that is still a
fair way off. It can happen with any group as long as they keep that
discipline and structure there, it could go on for another hundred years."

Marrett's work also took him undercover into what was once the nation's
most infamous Italian crime patch, Griffith in NSW.

In Undercover, he describes his pursuit of Ross Trimbole, the nephew of
crime boss Robert Trimbole, and recalls a question he posed to Trimbole in
the mid-'90s.

When he asked Trimbole if he considered himself Mafia, Trimbole allegedly
replied: "We don't use that word we just call ourselves family. We look
after each other. We have family in all states. We have family in Italy."

Over a decade later in Calabria, and it is family connections that remain a
concern to Salvatore Curcio. He does not claim there is a distinct Honoured
Society in Australia, but that the group is present here, he says, is
beyond dispute. "To think these people are chicken thieves is a gross
error. And to think that 'Ndrangheta continues to operate in the way and
form it did 50 years ago is exceedingly misleading. Fax, internet,
computer, the ease of moving by plane (are used by) mafioso
organisations," he says.

When questioned about the view commonly held by Australian police that
Italy's anti-Mafia authorities have both a vested interest and a track
record in talking up the presence of the Mafia overseas, Curcio's response
is blunt. He points to Operation Decollo and says many of its targets are
already serving lengthy prison sentences. "We have issued our judicial
measures. Then it will be for the Australian authorities to decide what to do."

With additional reporting from Italy by GIULIA SIRIGNANI