Inside Operation Afghan: Behind the Griffith Mafia | Peter Kos

In this episode, Adam Shand speaks with retired Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Kos, one of the original investigators behind Operation Afghan — a daring undercover sting targeting Italian organised crime in Griffith during the 1990s. Peter lifts the lid on the truth behind the famous infiltration of the Griffith Mafia.

From the early days of the drug squad and the rise of Antonio Romeo to undercover art dealers, fake identities and multimillion-dollar stings that pushed the limits of the law, Peter Kos reveals how the operation unfolded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Apote production.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shand, I'm your host
Adam Shand. Operation Afghan was an undercover operation by Victoria
Police in the mid nineteen nineties. The took down Antonio Romeo,
a rising member of the Calabrian mafia in Griffith, New
South Wales. Romeo did eight years jail for conspiring to
import cannabis. But if he thought he was going back

(00:36):
to business after his stretch, he was wrong.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
In July two thousand and two, six weeks after getting
out of jail, Antonio Romeo was taken out by a
sniper from long range while pruning peach trees in his
family's orchard.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
To understand why this happened, you have to delve into
the undercover operation that took down his empire, and that's
been told through a successful book, Infiltration, written by former
operation member Colin McLaren.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Former Detective Colin McLaren's bestseller Infiltration detailed how he posed
as art dealer Cole Goodwin to penetrate the Griffith mafia.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
My guest today, retired Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Coss, who
ran the operation, has written his own account of Operation Afghan,
McLaren and his pretend brother, under cover cop Damien Marritt,
did an amazing job, but there were others involved. Let's
start by trying to understand what this operation was all
about and who the targets were. Peter Coss, Welcome to

(01:37):
the show. What was Operation Afghan all about? All?

Speaker 4 (01:41):
Operation Afghan was the next part of a series of
earlier operations. I was working at the Drug Squad and
the Drug Squad established a task force called the Rover
Task Force, which was a joint task force between Victoria
Police and the National Crime Authority and we were all
made members of the National Crime Authory so we could
use their powers. And it was run separately from the

(02:05):
Drug Squad in a separate secure office, and our task
was to investigate it tea an organized crime and determine
the extent of it and that sort of thing. So
the NCAA had set up a number of or identified
a number of targets for investigation and we began on

(02:26):
those targets. An early operation we did was targeting the
Miroatore family, Alfonso Mauriture, Yes, Olfonso Mirotare and Vince Murrature.
And as a result of that operation and we were
starting at the bottom. We're looking at low level drug dealers.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Here.

Speaker 4 (02:43):
We ran an undercover operation on Vince Mirature that led
us to his supplier of what he was, a low
level cannabis dealer, So it led us to his supply
who was dealing not in ounces and grams, that he
was dealing in like pounds and kilos. So once we'd
made that connection, we'd moved up the tree. We left

(03:05):
in slone and we started looking at this other bloke
who I will call mister Valencia. Mister Valencia, we worked
on him for fairwhile, and these operations, these operations prior
to that, we came under the heading of our Operation Reactor.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
So we then to come up with these names.

Speaker 4 (03:24):
Yeah, well you know, you can choose your name sometimes
and other times they're given to you. Interestingly enough, the
Rover Task Force was called Rover because the National Crime
Authority's name for investigating own organized crime was Operation Cerberus.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
The three headed dog.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
Vadi's Yeah, so all our jobs were meant to be
named after dog. So we were the Rover Task Force,
hence Operation Afghan Lad on Afghan Dog. We worked on
mister Valencia for a while and mister Valencia. We established
that he was being supplied his cannabis from his Italian

(04:04):
friends in Griffith.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
In New South Wales. When did you first identify Antonio
Romeo as a suspect.

Speaker 4 (04:10):
We identified Tonio Romeo first as a suspect as a
result of our work on mister Valencia, and he was
identified around about the September October of nineteen ninety two.
So there were three teams on the task force. Each
team had a sergeant, a detective sergeant and a crew
of three or four detectives, and our hierarchy about that
we had one senior sergeant. In the end, it started

(04:31):
with two book we had one senior sergeant and then
we had a chief inspector, Rod Collins.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Okay, let's set the scene here and where Romeo fits in.
We're talking about the Griffith Mafia, the Calabrian Indra Guita
as people call them, and they were the nucleus of
people that I guess Donald McKay was complaining about in
the seventies, which possibly led to his abduction and murder
in nineteen seventy seven. But we're now seeing a changing

(04:57):
of the guard. The old Giovanni surgery Joe, who was
probably the nominal head of the group down there. He
was now giving way to Antonio Romeo, who was from
Platy and he married into the family.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
I believe that's right.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
So in Griffith at the time, because well prior to
Colin arriving, I'd been to Griffith. I made contact with
the analysts at the Griffith Police station, and also I
made contact with the organized crime unit in Sydney. And
there were four crime families operating or known to be
operating out of Griffith. One of them was headed by,

(05:32):
as you said, Giovanni Sergei, and he was becoming an
old man and his daughter Maria had married a guy
called Antonio Romeo. So Antonio Romeo was the son in
law of old mister Sergi. Mister Sergei or Giovanni Sergei
had his own sons, but Romeo was the guy who
fit the bill as the guy to next in.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Line to take over.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Why do you think.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
I don't know exactly why, but he probably was the
sort of guy that had the smarts about him. Maybe
maybe he was all that way incline then Sergey's own sons.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
And he'd also been born in Platy, that's right, and
one would assume he had some connections back to the
main headquarters of Indida Guita, the Callabria of mafia.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (06:17):
So just by the way, on the at rover, we
never actually referred to them as mafia or in drink.
It was always attained organized crime. But those words pop
up quite often in Colin's book. With what I'm doing,
those words really appear.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Well.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
I think you're right, because when I read your book
and seen all the other material on this, I mean,
you'd have to say that it's small m mafia rather
than big m because these are local entrepreneurial groups that
don't seem to have any day to day connection. It's
more like a franchise operation rather than the reconnection.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
Call it the poor man's version of the mafia, right
in a sense, if we can put it that way.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
We've identified Romeo as the main suspect, and at this
time Victoria police and the NCAA was getting interested in
the Italian organized crime, as you call it, and you
were looking at the extent of the tentacles there. This
is also the post Mackay world as well.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
What were you looking for in that investigation.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
Well, we're looking for evidence of criminal activity. I suppose
it didn't matter what sort of criminal activity that was.
Whether it would be drug trafficking, which was their main
source of income, mainly trafficking in large quantities of cannabis,
but as the job moved on, they were definitely dealing
in cocaine as well. It could have identified other things

(07:35):
such as murders because leading up to this in Melbourne
you had the fruit and vegetable market murders going on,
Mirrotare murtures. Alfonse had been well, he hadn't been shot yet.
That was still come during that That happened while we
were investigating, but it had a number of murders going
back over a decade or two with the teams trying

(07:56):
to control the fruit and vegetable market at in footscrape.
In other parts of the country you had things such
as the Donald mckaye incident, and there were other crimes
being committed throughout Australia anyway.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Yeah, and I think what was obvious in those days
it was sort of quaint in a way because you're
looking back at the era when there was large outdoor
crops of cannabis, being grown in the Griffith area and
this was incredibly successful and financially lucrative for these four families.
So you start to see the growth in the power

(08:28):
of these families and the ability to act lawlessly, to
rub out competitors, to corrupt politicians. That was always talked
that the Griffith Mafia had corrupted ol Grasby, for instance,
the Ministry of Immigration and through that means had got
crooks into Australia. So the stakes were pretty high. There.
You are Victoria Police drug squad, You've got virtually no

(08:50):
resources and you think you're going to take on the
Calabrian mafia. You had a bit of h bit of gumption.

Speaker 4 (08:57):
A bit of gumption, but it was sort of like
this is just another job.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
We took it on.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
It was something different, something special, and our resources were
increased slightly. We had our own dedicated team of dogs,
dogs playing surviolence operatives, people who follow you around in cars,
on foot, that sort of thing. At the time, in
Victoria police didn't have the ability to intercept mobile telephone calls,
so mobile phones were a new thing when the task

(09:24):
force started. We were still all using pages. Mobile phones
were something that you found in your car basically bolted
down in the console area. They weren't the sort of
thing you carried around on your person. But a year
or so down the track, when Afghan started, which was
around about January or February of ninety three, mobile phones

(09:47):
started to come in and they were the big bricks
that people used to carry around.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
You might recall those.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
But more importantly, Victoria Police didn't have the capacity to
intercept mobile phones at that time. Our special operations could
intercept landlines, but not mobile phones, but the National Crime
Authority could and they could do it through their Sydney office.
So we actually had Tony Rameo's phone off which is

(10:16):
intercepted prior to McClaren actually arriving at the Task force,
right yeah, and we had a couple of other phones
off as well.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Some backgrounds needed here because the picture you painted, the
resources and the technology and so forth. That it's a
wonder you caught any drug crooks at all. I mean,
and you did pretty well. But there was also a
decision by Victoria Police to become a bit more entrepreneurial,
shall we say, in this era, and to do things
you hadn't done before. For instance, Operation Chances had happened

(10:46):
before this where you were delivering precursor chemicals into the
underworld through informers to now bust these clan labs as
they were called back in the day, because you had
an explosion of drugs in Melbourne at that time. So
Victoria Police was now getting more entrepreneurial. I've got some
issues with some of the these methods. I have to
tell you where this discussion before, because I think it

(11:08):
does fall into the trapment in some ways.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
I think it depends how you look at it. Operation Chances.
That was a job that my crew ran in ninety one.
I actually put the broof of evidence together for that.
We ticked off about certainly in drug traffickers. Out of
that one look that started not so much providing chemicals
through informants. We knew that certain biking groups were buying

(11:32):
precursor chemicals directly from the chemical companies, and the chemical
companies were aware of it, and one of them contacted
our office and said, we've got a certain bloke buying chemicals.
We think he's probably making it fedamines. At the time,
if you bought a chemical which was a precursor for
making amphetamines, you had to sign an end user's certificate

(11:54):
saying to the company, I'm using this for lawful purposes.
The Bikis didn't care what they signed, as long as
they got their chemicals. They would sign the bit of
paper and that was it. There was no account for it. Obviously,
legitimate businesses would sign them, and they could account for
it by making aspro and all sorts of things. So
when we found out about that, we thought, well, let's
go down to the factory. Next time they ring up

(12:16):
and come in. Make sure you get them to come
in at a particular time. You tell us when that is,
and we'll see what happens. And you're hiding behind the
shelves there as they're coming in the Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
So we would go down there, and we had a
guy in our.

Speaker 4 (12:29):
Office whose nickname was Itchy, and Itchi was a bit
of a rough look consider character. He would act as
the storman. So we would hide in the storeroom where
all the shelves and the chemicals were kept. The bike
he would come into the storeroom and he would pay
the money over the counter to Ichi, and Ichi would
supply them with his chemicals. Then we would follow them

(12:50):
and try and find out what they were then doing
with those chemicals, trying to locate their mphedoma labs, and
that's the way we did it in Operation Chances. We
did that for a while, but then these chemical companies
are like in the outer Southeast, and we were located
in Russell Strait, so sometimes we get the call. By
the time we get down there, the crooks are coming

(13:11):
early and nicked off with the chemicals. So to control that,
we suggested to the two main chemical companies that were
supplying them, we can't control these deliveries or whatever. So
what we want you to do is you need to
tell these guys you can't buy them anymore from us
because the government's cracking down on the end user agreements

(13:32):
and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
But you know a guy who's a broker.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
You tell a bike is throughing this particular bloke, and
he'll be able to supply with whatever you like. So
the bloke they then started ringing was a guy in
our office called Wayne Strawn. He acted as our undercover.
Whenever they wanted chemicals, Rain would be interacting with them.
He would say, oh, look, they're after a bit of
me curate chloride. So we would then go and buy

(13:56):
mecurate chloride from the chemical company. We'd multiply the price
by three to make it look like it was a
black market sort of figure and would sell it to
him for that price. So, for the first time, probably
in the drug squad history, we were not only selling
chemicals to crooks, but we were making money. You found

(14:17):
the right business, We joined the right business now in
the hands of the right people, and which we were
honest and detectives and all the rest.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
It worked fine until well, that's some years later.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
You know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
That's Wayne Strawn.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
That's Wayne Strawn. But when we ran that job with Wayne,
and Wayne did a brilliant job. Is he undercover on
that he was a very good undercover operative. We busted
two chemical labs and all the chemicals that we gave
them were either used to make amphetamines which we seized,
or they were at the labs when we busted them,

(14:53):
so nothing got out and into the community.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Don't get me wrong, I think it was highly effective
what you did very successful as well, But I think
there was an element of intolerable and Wayne Strawn fell
to that. He ended up doing his deals on the
side and was busted for that and got a very
long jail sentence, and you, I think, were shocked because
this guy was an absolute star.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
Well, Wayne Strawn was the golden head boy basically of
the Drug Squad when I was. I was there from
ninety to ninety seven, and after we did Operation Chances,
I was shanghaid off onto the Raver Task Force because
we had done a fairly good jobs at our time.
Was sent to the Rover Task Force after I had
left at some stage in period in time, and I'm

(15:35):
not sure when they established the chemical desk at the
Drug Squad. By the time I finished on the Task
Force three years later, the chemical desk was running and
that was being operated by Wayinstrawn. I left in ninety seven,
and I believe Wayne's issues started sometime after that.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
That's right, and tragic fall from grace. But like I say,
this was an era where Victoria Police was being innovative
and finding ways because the crooks had huge amounts of money,
they were bold and getting bold, and you had to
do something. So this was a proactive strategy and so
Chances And it's the chemical diversion death that came after
that I think had the hallmark of that. So when

(16:15):
it comes to Operation Afghan, that same spirits brought to
bear where you think we're going to go undercover here
and try to encourage these Griffith mafia to start to
do business with us so we can bust them. So
what were the objectives of that? Because you had McLaren
coming in posing as Cole Goodwin art dealer. He had

(16:36):
one of the dogs so called Judy. We won't go
to her surname, but and they went into Griffith. What
was their mission? But they didn't have a mission. Ah,
they didn't have a mission. Just going back a step.
Our mantra at the time was if it's legal, we'll
do it. If it's immoral, that's a matter of for
other people. How often was that line crossed in your

(16:59):
opinion where you felt this is immoral?

Speaker 4 (17:01):
Well, the moral question was you shouldn't be supplying chemicals
to crooks to make them fetterment because well, you're not
necessarily encouraging them because they're going to get them from
someone else anyway. So that was our thinking that if
we don't sell it to them, which is morally wrong,
if we're trying to set them up, but they just

(17:23):
be getting it from someone else, So why not get
in there yourself and use that line of investigation to
bust their labs? Fair enough, and I think there was
nothing wrong with it. That might be a bit hard
for some people to believe that the way in which
we did it, it was very effective in identifying and

(17:44):
fedamine labs and locking up crooks, which is what we meant.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I think was many defense lawyers, crooks, and a few
civil libertarians had a problem with it. But I mean
the same spirit was brought into operation Afghanis and so
Cole Goodwin and he is offside Beyonce Judy posing as
an art dealer going into Griffith. Now they didn't have
a mission explain that, no, So we had a number
of things going on. Antonio Ramo and his cohorts. They

(18:08):
were attempting to set up a very large indoor cannabis
crop in the north of Melbourne. They were involved in
another cannabis crop that was on a farm. They were
involved in setting up another cannabis crop in a factory
in the north of Melbourne. And we were aware that
they were fixing horse racers and all sorts of things
were going on. So we wanted to catch them basically

(18:31):
doing what they were doing, and that was trafficking in cannabis.

Speaker 4 (18:35):
I mean mister Valencia. When we busted him, he driven
to Griffith to buy fifty oranges and some puppies and
a couple of puppies.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, oranges was clearly a code for cannabis. What was
the puppy code for?

Speaker 4 (18:48):
Well, you'd be surprised. But after he brought his fifty oranges,
which was fifty pounds of cannabis, that's the level that
the Griffith bikes were dealing in. On his way back
home he picked up two puppies. When we intercepted him
on the highway, we were very keen to find out
what the two puppies were, and they were, in fact
us two dogs, two dogs, So I suppose we were

(19:10):
trying to catch them at what they were already doing,
which was trafficking in large amounts of cannabis. Everyone's got
their own opinion on whether cannabis is good, bad, or otherwise.
As a detective, as an investigator, as a law enforcement officer,
it's illegal. You can't traffick in it. So if it's illegal,
it's not up for me as a police officer say, oh, look,

(19:31):
it's only cannabis, don't worry about it. I'm there to
uphold the law and we don't make the law. The
government does.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
And I think public opinion was swinging that direction that
this is a victimless crime and so forth. But let's
look at the Italian organized crime operation. It's involved in
extortion and murder and race fixing, assault, all kinds of
things going on, and the cannabis money is the fuel
for all that.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
And they were getting anywhere from three thousand and five
thousand dollars a pound, so you know, the fifty oranges
that mister Valencia bought was worth anywhere from one hundred
and fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
depending on the quality of the cannabis. So that's the
sort of money we're talking about. Of course, that also
they're not paying any tax on that. There's no benefit

(20:19):
to society. The only society that it's benefiting is their
own little the honored society. Yeah, there aren't not a
little honest society.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
But it's also Griffith was booming on the back of this,
wasn't it resolutely. I mean your hotel's, restaurants, developments, houses that,
I mean, the whole area was benefiting economically.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
I mean you would drive to Griffith going up through
Country Victoria, across the river at Token Wall and you
go through those towns, it was like passing through an
old western town where you got the tumbleweeds coming down
the main street and half the shops they've got newspaper
stuck on the wind borders up there. Yeah, because like
those little towns weren't doing too well. Drive down the

(20:59):
main street of Banner Strait and it was like being
a like on straight.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
It was.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
The place was pumping because not only did they have
they were growing crops because of the irrigation. They had citrus,
they had other fruit trees, they had the grapes, a
lot of wine up there to Borutley's. If one crop
wasn't doing well, if the wheat on the outskirts of
town wasn't doing well, or the rice wasn't, then the
vines were growing or the citrus was going. But there

(21:23):
was always money in the town, including the other crop
that was being grown, and that was pumping a lot
of money into town too. Especially with building mansions, and
some people didn't seem to work too much, but they
always had plenty of money to splash around the place,
so there was a lot of money going around.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Good Let's get back to Cole Goodwin and his mission.
That wasn't quite a mission. How did it come about?

Speaker 4 (21:45):
Yeah, So without really telling anyone, Cole took it upon
himself to go to Griffith. So he ostensibly wanted to
go to Griffith to have a bit of a look see,
because he was one of the sergeants on the task force.
Between the three sergeants they would run the jobs, and
he was very interested in the job that we had
with all these other things. So he decided to get

(22:08):
himself familiar with the place. He'd already been up to
Sydney to listen to the NCAA phones and look at
the set up there, and then he wanted to go
to Griffith and look at the set up there. So
he went to Griffith and he took duty with him
and Peter. They were both dogs. They had followed mister
Valencia to Griffith and they knew the location or whereabouts
of the farm where the cannabis had been picked up from.

(22:31):
They didn't know the exact farm location, but they sort
of knew the vicinity. So he wanted to go up
there and have a look himself, right, That's what he said.
That was the purpose of his trip. What he actually
did was he went up there with what he says
he made up on the spot that he was drinking
at the Workingman's cub or the ex Serviceman's Club, I

(22:52):
should say, after having a look around Griffith one night
and he saw these Italian people, et cetera, et cetera.
He got friendly with a lady there who was interacting
with them. You call her Pan called her Pam, so
she's not of a tea and heritage. They got talking
to Pam and at the end of that night, when

(23:13):
they were leaving the Exes which is the ex Serviceman's
Club he is known as the Exies, Pam basically identified
who these bikes were to McLaren and Judy and Peter,
and these bikes she identified was Romeo, his brother Rocco,
and he's what we would later call his.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
First lieutenant, Rosario Trimbaldi.

Speaker 4 (23:37):
He didn't speak to them, wasn't introduced to them, but
they sort of acknowledged him on the way out because
he was with Pam. It went on from there. They
went and had a few more drinks with Pam or Square,
and then they told Pam they'd come back in another
couple of weeks. At that time he told her that
he was an art dealer. These name was Cole Goodwin,
Judy was his girlfriend, and Peter was just a friend.

(24:00):
So he set it up then. So to my mind,
he either made that up on the spot or he
had a preconceived plan with all these names and identities.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Already worked out.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
But I can't tell you whether that's true or not,
because unlike most COVID sort of investigations, you do like
that he wasn't wearing a wire or there was no
recording of any of this interaction.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
And normally this would be the way you do it.
You would have back up, because this is a dangerous moment.
You're bowling up to some very heavy organized crime figures
with a pretext. And I've got to tell you, when
I look at the alias and the whole thing, I mean,
they're supposed to be professionals. Why did they fall for this?
Because if someone came to me and said, oh, I'm

(24:48):
an art dealer, that and the other. I know it's
pre the Internet, but surely a couple of phone calls
to Melbourne or Candor or somewhere in the art world
would have established there ain't no Cole Goodwin and you're
probably talking to an undercover copper. So I mean, for
a start, they sound like they're pretty soft targets. Really yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:05):
I mean, I've often said all crooks are dumb, and
there's the reason for that is because they don't think
of things like doing your due diligence like we it's
belted into us. You do your due diligence on people
that you've met and people you're working on and that
sort of thing. You need to know exactly who it is.
But these guys are crooks. I think one didn't have

(25:26):
that sort of background.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Well apparently not, but I'm sure they got it after
this because I guess one of the key attractions to
them was that Cole Goodwin was offering them a way
to launder their money, which is the perennial problem for
the drug crook, actually getting rid of your cash. So
he was saying, I can do some funny business through
art sales and things where you can hide your money
and wash it. And this must have been tremendously appealing.

(25:50):
I mean, yes, they're not that smart, but I think
every crook has their unique selling point. So I think
the plan was well pitched as it were, But I
still have to question, and I think this is probably
something that contributed to Romeo's ultimate dem eyes that they've
been infiltrated so easily.

Speaker 4 (26:08):
Yeah, and when it came to talking about because Cole
bought up the topic of you can use art to
hide money that sort of thing. He brought it up
in a very surreptitious sort of way. But it wasn't
at the first meeting or the second meeting, and probably
not at the third meeting. It was some further time
down the track that that was brought in. It was

(26:31):
just the first number of meetings that they had were
basically just dipping your toe in the water and just
getting to bump into them and know them a little bit,
just general conversation with them, but using PAM as a tool,
I suppose a reference really yeah, as a reference point
for them to get in and talk to them. And

(26:53):
then they just happened to turn up when the attens
were available to talk to.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, so they accept Cole and Judy into their circle.
It develops to the point where you need to set
up a Melbourne head quarters for Cole. How was that done?

Speaker 4 (27:08):
He had gone ahead and taken himself out of the
office basically as an investigator, and he was now an
undercover operative. Right Generally, when if you're setting something up
like this, you would have a backstory already done. The
backstory wasn't done because we didn't know he was going
to go out and start this undercover part of the operation.

(27:30):
So what happened was we had to build a backstory.
We had to get him bank accounts, we had to
get him a driver's license, all sorts of things to
legitimize his persona as Cole Goodwin Art dealer. Having that,
we decided that he needed a house or some place
in Melbourne where he could bring his Italians friend to
because we knew they'd come to Melbourne all the time.

(27:52):
I mean we'd had the phones office some time at
this stage, probably well over six months. So Colin found
a place in East Melbourne and it's just a very
small one bedroom unit, nothing too flashy, and it took
us about three or four weeks to set that unit up.
So first thing we had to do was put furniture
in there. So we had to organize furniture. Fortunately we

(28:15):
had the NCAA financially backing us. If we were getting
furniture off the Victoria Police, they'd probably throw a few
deck chairs in there that they might buy a second hand.
But we had some fairly good looking furniture put in there.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Well, there were limits because you ended up putting some
of your unwanted wedding presents.

Speaker 4 (28:31):
Into that, right, Yeah, So we all bought in stuff
from our own homes. I went with Colin to EA's
house in Hawthorne. He had got a number of paintings
and bits and paces out of there. We moved all
that into the unit. While we were doing that, we're
also putting in listening devices and video devices so it
could be turned off and turned on when we wanted
it to. So anyone who went into that unit we

(28:53):
recorded everything. Because being a one bedroom unit, the living
area in the kitchen were virtually the one sort of
room and it was just the bedroom elsewhere, So anytime
the crooks came or anyone came, they could be recorded.
But it was just a front, and we knew when
Colin would have to be there because we had the

(29:14):
phones off.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
We knew exactly where the crooks were all the time.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
So now the infrastructure is all in place. You played
catch up, Cole, Goodwin and Duty are established and now
things are moving towards encouraging them to do business. Let's Cole,
what were the planned operations that came out of this. Now,
this rapport that had been.

Speaker 4 (29:31):
Created well over a period of about five months, Colin
Judy had been engaging with them, going out for dinner
in Melbourne, bumping into them in Griffith, talking.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
A little bit about this, little bit about that.

Speaker 4 (29:43):
Then they got on to Cole's idea of how you
could make money out of investing in art. So Washington
laundering your money, laundering your money with most drug squad jobs,
you're in there within one or two meetings, you're talking
drugs with low level drug dealers, meetium level drug dealers,
that sort of thing, because that's what you're after with
these guys. You had to go slowly, slowly, because cold

(30:05):
and have a drug dealing background. He was an art dealer,
so he come up with this idea that he had
friends in the media, and these friends, you know like drugs.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
They liked drugs.

Speaker 4 (30:17):
So at one meeting in the December, they came back
after dinner, they went out to a restaurant called Lotchcacheatoria.
It was a very interesting group of people meeting there.
So that was Colin and Judy and the Griffith Targets
with their girlfriends. And then after that they went out
for drinks at a bar. And at that bar, Cole
mentioned his friends, you know, and he says, oh, you

(30:39):
know what they're like, you know, sex, drugs, rock and roll.
From that initial conversation, the talk of cocaine and drugs
came up, particularly cocaine, and straightaway Trimbali took the bait
and said, if you need cocaine, I can get you
as much as you like. Basically, from that point the

(30:59):
investigation turned from a friendly get together meeting up with
each other for dinner and whatever too. Basically, we're going
to be dealing in drugs from here on.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
And to cut a long story short, Cole Goodwin ends
up buying one hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of cocaine,
which is paid for out of the taxpayer's dollar. How On, earth.
Did anyone persuade Victoria Police and the NCAA to come
up with one hundred and eighty grand, which you may
not see again, to buy cocaine? I might I find
that astounding. There was a tone of the times I

(31:30):
guess it.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Was, I mean shock horror.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Normally, if you're buying anything for more than ten thousand dollars,
the department didn't want to part with it, so you'd
hand over the money and then you would bust them
in a buy bust sort of sting. At the time,
when we purchased the one killer of cocaine, which costs
hundred and eighty thousand dollars plus, we then had to
find another five thousand for the driver.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
And I think the NCAA and the vic cops walked
at the five grand almost stross moves the whole thing.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
Well, look, the total buy money which we had at
the drug squad for her annum at that time was
just over two hundred thousand dollars, So to say goodbye
one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, they weren't really too
happy about it, so they stamped up thirty thousand, and
the NCAA came up with the other hundred and fifty.
At the last minute, the crooks decided someone at the

(32:17):
courier that cocaine from Griffith down to Melbourne, and the
courier wanted five thousand dollars, which they put on us.
And for about two hours there was a lot of
hassle between our office and the nca office. Sister, who's
going to come up with the other five thousand dollars,
you know, But look it was over and done within
within a couple of hours. The NCAA came good and

(32:38):
we bought that. I photo copied every note at the
nca office. Our photo copier was so slow, so we
took the money over the NCAA office and they had
a photocopyer machine which is almost the size of like
a landing or landing craft, you know, like it was
just massive and in the blink of an eye it
was photo copying the cash as it flowed through. So

(32:59):
we photo copied all the serial numbers, none of which
actually were ever located ever found any cash that we
sees later on, none of them matched the money that
we purchased the cake for.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
And you buy the coke and shock horror, it wasn't
quite as pure as had been advertised, was it?

Speaker 1 (33:17):
No, it was still fairly pure.

Speaker 4 (33:19):
I think he was saying, oh, you know, it's ninety
percent pure, under percent pure. I mean that's just them talking,
and I mean Rosario's way of identifying how pure cocaine
was was to Licky's finger, dip it in the powder
and see how long it took for his tongue to
go numb. Obviously, when we buy cocaine, you go, right, well,

(33:39):
I want a sample, we want to test it. A
sample was taken from the kilo and it was taken
to our person who tests it, which we use the
forensic labs for that. That went to forensic. They came
back and said, yeah, see me off percent pure. So
then then we went ahead and made the deal. Now,
the reason we let the money run on the cocaine
was Cole had already set up in discussion with importing

(34:03):
a ton of cannabis from pop New Guinea into Australia.
So buying the cocaine only identified two or three of
the crew. Organizing an importation on that scale would identify
a lot more of his crew. So we wanted the
cocaine to go and we were going to bust them
on importing the cannabis.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
Right, fascinating this whole thing. Here are the Griffith mafia
living in grass castles down there, supposedly growing all the
marijuana and Victoria and Miss South Wales and suddenly the
kookiest plan of all time to import Papa New Guinea
and cannabis. Yeah it's a pretty unlikely and dumb, risk

(34:42):
laden thing to do.

Speaker 4 (34:44):
Yeah, it's interesting. I think maybe they'd been under pressure
with their outdoor crops. The Coliambly crop had been busted
a few years earlier, the Bungen door crop, which was
quite famous. The days of the really large outdoor crops
were coming to an end. There was more aerial surveillance
I know at the time because one of the guys
on the task force was condered to the New South

(35:07):
Wales's cannabis crop team. Each year during the season, the
growing season, they would send them up in a chopper
and they basically fly down the Murray on the New
South Wales side of the border and from up above
they could identify where the crops were. They would then
drop down in the helicopter and they wouldn't arrest anyone.
They would just basically destroy the crop, then they'd fly

(35:31):
up and they'd move on to the next one. So
there was a lot of pressure for them growing large
crops outdoors, so it was sort of coming to an end.
But the other thing was, if you're growing a crop outdoors,
it's subject.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
To the elements.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
You've got no control over the quality of your product.
That's why they were starting to look at growing crops indoors.
But in Papua New Guinea in the tropics, there no surveillance,
nothing like that. With the rainfall they had, the cannabis
was pretty damn special, so I think that's why they
were getting it from there.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
I do remember going to Papua New Guinea in about
nineteen ninety eight and flying out to doing a famine,
bushfire and so forth, and flying out to the remote
areas there and coming to villages and there were huge
stands of marijuana. In fact, one of our crew was
just trying to bring back a whole bunch and we said,
you're not bringing that stuff and the army helicopter, thank

(36:23):
you very much.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Luck.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
But it was a perfect growing environment, so this was
going to be the big deal. And for you guys,
this was a massive operation. There was what three or
four locations going on. There was going to be a
light plane meeting the cannabis courier on Horn Island near
Papua New Guinea and then flying that into Queensland. Just
take me through the operations. It was going to be.

Speaker 4 (36:46):
Yeah, to start with the idea of importing the cannabis.
That was something that was brought up by the Italians.
It's important to stress that because when it comes to
things like agent provocateur, if we had suggested it, then
even though I don't know if you can use agent
provocatur in Victoria, but you want to avoid that at

(37:08):
all costs, in other words, provoking something that happen right.
We didn't want to be setting them up. Yes, they
set themselves up right. So it was their idea and
it was their idea to get a plane. All we
did was facilitate their wishes. So the plane was who
was a person in the PNG Defense Forces who was
training at the Wagga Army facility or Air Force facility

(37:29):
at Wagga, and he knew a few people, and those
people knew the Italians. And when he was stealing in
cannabis Likecally, he was going this stuff is shit. You know,
there's much better stuff in pingj I can get you
as much as you like. One thing led to another
and they came up with the idea, well, let's import
this really good stuff from P and G. So the
p G guy's name was Harley. So the plane was

(37:51):
that Harley would scowl the hinterland and the high lands
and the laylands of PNG get as much as he
could together, and he would consolidate all that on an
island called Daku Island on the south coast of P
and G. He would then use his contacts. Initially it
was going to use his contacts in the army. Then
the flight to Horn Island and Horn Island is basically

(38:14):
just in airstrip which is used for people flying in
and out of Thursday Island. First Island is nearby and
that's basically the headquarters of the Torres Strait for Australia.
So you would fly into Horn Island and you would
get a bit across to Thurst Island, and the plan
was for the Italian Griffiths to fly up to Horn Island,

(38:35):
they would meet, do a swap and then fly back
and land somewhere in southern New South Wales, but they
would then meet it at the runway and take it
back to wherever they hide there the year. So the runway,
which was identified by Cole, was the airport at Kahuna.
First of all, they wanted to set it down on
a dirt airstrip that they would sort of make on

(38:57):
their farm or something like that seat of the pants
sort of stuff. But you can't land a light aircraft
with a ton of cannabis on on a dirt runway.
So one thing led to another as the plan developed.
The only real change was Harley was going to bring
it across in a boat. The only plan that really
a light plan that could take a ton was a

(39:20):
Cesna caravan. For love nor money, we couldn't hire one.
We couldn't find one anywhere in Australia. So the NCAA
was footing the bill for all this. So they come
up with a pipe Navajo chieftain that could take it
a load of up to seven hundred and fifty kilos
along with the three passengers, the pilot and two passengers
on board. As they were considering all the options, Rosario Trimbali,

(39:44):
who was sort of running this as Romeo's lieutenant he
came up the idea of doing a dummy run up
to Horn Island just to test it out, to make
sure that would work. So what happened there in say
March ninety four. By this time Colin's offsider Damien Marritt,
who was known as Colin's brother Ben, because Judy.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
In a moment of sexist policing, has been sidelined now
as I got down to the pointing, and I think
she must have said, hang on, I was good enough
for the introductions and the rapport building thing, but now
when comes to the action, I'm getting sideline. How is
she feeling about that?

Speaker 4 (40:21):
I'm not sure exactly how she felt about it. I
never spoke to about it, but that the problem for
Judy was you can claim sexism in most workplaces. The
drug dealers aren't structured like they're not and they won't
talk in front of the ladies. And that was made
quite clear by both Raemeo and Trimpoli.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
And I think also Damian Merritt had an advantage. He'd
done some work with the Italians at Mildura correct, so
he was a good knock about and I think he's
still a good knock about. He's a product investigator these days,
and I do talk to him. So he comes in
and he's a useful foil for Cole as his brother Ben.
But even at that point they're not getting on that well.
And as we go down the years, the differences have
got quite wide. In their accounts, the mud get slung

(41:02):
back and forth.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
Yeah, yeah, I think reading the handwritten accounts they made
at the time their association, it was a bit like,
you know, trying to fit a square pig in a
round hole. They were different as far as in age went.
They had different ideas, tastes, and Merritt was a very
accomplished undercover operative. Cole was too, but Marrett specifically specialized

(41:28):
in drugs and his knowledge was probably a.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Bit more superior.

Speaker 4 (41:32):
In my opinion, Let's face it, I could never be
an undercover operative, you know, I just don't have that
sort of talent. They both had big egos. One car
with two of them driving up and down to Griffith
in it for four hours or whatever it took. Must
have been difficult for both of them to maintain a
conversation other than talk about work, which, from what I understand,

(41:55):
Cole loved to talk about work and Damien wasn't that
interested in going over things time and time again. But yeah,
that's I suppose that's a matter of we'd have to
speak to them about. But quite clearly from what I read,
you could tell from their own writings that they weren't
too happy with each other at the time.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
And to the extent where when the actual mission comes along,
rather than send Ben, who's the logical one to send
the underling, as it were, Cole decides he has to go.
And even the Italians question this, They say, Ah, you're
the boss, why are you going along doing the drudging work?
You know you should send Ben and call it to
come up with an excuse as to why he was

(42:36):
doing it. But I guess by this point, my goodness,
the amount of money you fellas have spent this is
like something out of Miami Vice. You know, one hundred
and eighty k on the coke, You've got the plane,
you've got the dry run, you've got all this stuff
going on. I mean, not a single person's been pinched
at this stage. Yeah, a high stakes moment. Take us
through that final phase of when it actually came together.

Speaker 4 (42:57):
Yeah, Rosario. Initially the plan was for Rosario Trimboli to
go on the plane to Horn Island, and we could
only fit a pilot in two people because of the
amount of cannabis, the seven to fifty kilo, we'll try
to fit in there. So Rosario he worms his way
out of it, and he nominates his brother Dominic, to go.

(43:19):
So Dominic is the fall guy for them, but at
the very last minute he decides, no, I'm not going
to risk my brother. We're going to send a guy
called Lindsay. And he's not even Italian. So they sent
a guy called Lindsay Boram. He knew Harley, whereas the
Italians really didn't. They were introduced to Harley through someone else.
So Lindsay basically is their full guy. And Lindsay complains

(43:42):
about it to Colin on the way up, saying he's
taking all the risk. And as you said, Rosario questioned
Cole a number of times, you shouldn't be doing this.
You should send your brother Ben. But then Colin was
determined that he was going to go, and I suppose
as far as our office went, it was probably his call.

(44:03):
But it sort of went against the grain of being
the big time dealer as opposed to being the shitkicker
who has to go and pick up the.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Right And when Lindsay turns up, there's another complication. He's
a big bloke and wait, it's important on this trip
when you think we may have to offload some of
this cannabis to fit Lindsay's big bulk on the plane.

Speaker 4 (44:23):
Yes, that's right. So Lindsay turned up. Not only was
he big, but he had a big bag of clothing
bits and pieces he was taking. So when him and
Colin were finally driven out to Melbourne Airport, he went
without all his gear. They were going to stay overnight
in cans and then overnight in Weeper before then picking
up the light aircraft.

Speaker 2 (44:44):
So they get the light aircraft off, they go to
Horn Island under the cover of darkness, and the Griffith
Marfy is there waiting to in the south there to
pick up the pot. When it comes in plane lands,
where's Harley?

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Where's Harley? Indeed Harley was meant to be there.

Speaker 4 (45:01):
They arrived I think five minutes to five am, and
five m was the time for the meeting, and Harley
was meant to be coming in by boat with all
this cannabis. It's pitch black, I think Colin's got a torch.
They walk up and down the runway a bit, they
can't see anyone. They then use the aircraft they start

(45:22):
because all the lights on the aircraft were turned off
to save the battery, so then they got back on
the aircraft. They start the aircraft up and they used
the aircraft's lights to look around by maneuvering it up
and down the runway and Harley still can't be seen.
So they bring the plane back and they're sitting down.
They're a little bit dejected. Half an hour's gone past.
Lindsay's getting a bit worried, bit concerned, and he gets

(45:45):
the torch from Cole and he starts going to look
again and they.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Because the jungle is full of undercover I think they
were Queensland Special Operations Group.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yeah, so the Queensland cert were there.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
So the soldier cops.

Speaker 4 (45:59):
Yeah, basically the equivalent of our SOG. There was a
number of them hidden in the jungle, keeping an eye
on Colin and the pilot of the plane, who was
also an undercover cop. They were there for security. Now,
some people think there might have been thousands there. There weren't.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
There was only less than half a dozen.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
But he don't spoil the story. The jungle is supposed
to be full of these guys. They're supposed to be
supposed to be. The jungle was full of other critics, though,
and some birds were disturbed in the in what was
becoming the gray dawn, and they thought, oh, someone must
have disturbed the birds. So Lindsay gets the torch and
he heads off towards the birds, and Cole's saying, oh,

(46:40):
don't go down there, don't look down there. Not that
Cole knew where these bikes were, but he knew they
were hidden. Eventually, what happened was Lindsay steps and one
of these bikes. He realizes something's moved, and he goes,
who's there, and these two ninjas jump up out of
the out of the grass, out of the jungle and
basically jump on him and say you're under arrest, and

(47:02):
they've arrested him. That's the end of that dream. But
Harley never turned up, and it turned out later on
he gives evidence that he never intended to turn up.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (47:15):
Well, I don't think he actually gave evidence, but the
information we got out of Halley because he was never
extradited to Australia National somewhere along the lines that information
has been obtained and that he never intended to do that.
I mean, if he had intended to do it, there
would have been a boatload of cannabis floating round somewhere.
But at the time Borham was arrested, there was no

(47:38):
sound of any motor or boat or anything else because
they decided to give it another hour into the daylight
for Harley to come. So they hung around for about
another hour before basically the thing was called off. So
Harley never delivered that. Harley's not that stupid either, because

(47:58):
he might have come across as a bit of a
daby sort of character. But he had been paid quite
handsomely in excess of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
which was the down payment for the cannabis who was
meant to supply. And three to fifty thousand Australian dollars
is that'll get you through life in PNG quite comfortably.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
And to do nothing.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
That's wrong for doing nothing.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
So now it's your high wire, very expensive operation that's
gone from an importation to a conspiracy to import.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
But you were still go go where were you at this.

Speaker 4 (48:32):
Time while all that was happening, I was in a
motile room in Griffith. There was me and another bike
in our room, and that we had one of our
controllers in the other room, and there were a few
dogs cruising around Griffith keeping it on where our targets were.
So we get a phone call to say that Lindsay's
stepped on one of the snipers. And we also had

(48:52):
a huge number of people at Kahuna waiting down there
for the plane to come in, which wouldn't have come
until the afternoon, so it was quite clear that our
crooks and Griffith would know that nothing had happened. To
make sure that occurred, a couple of phone calls were
made from both Damien and Colin to Ross saying what's

(49:14):
going on, what's happened, and from Cole you know, Wally.
The boat never turned up, so we high tailed it
from there over to Miranda. In Miranda Worth the rest
of our people. We had probably over one hundred people
waiting to pounce on these people to arrest them, search
their houses and take them back to Griffith police station

(49:37):
and charge them. And we had the assistance of the
New South Wales Police NC operatives. We had people from everywhere.
It was just massive. So we make it to Norandra.
There's a massive briefing. The jobs changed. No one's going
to Kurna. In fact, the people at Kuna racing to Orandra.
They've got to get to Oranda before we head off
into Griffith, and they arrived just before we do that.

(49:59):
We rearrange all our rest teams and off we go
to arrest these guys in playing clothes. The plan was
to take cars drive from Miranda to Griffith, and we're
looking at probably about thirty or forty cars here, and
we're meant to leave at five minute intervals, so we
don't raise suspicion on the roads. What happens, of course,

(50:20):
everyone wants to get there straight up, and there was
this big congo line of cars on the road from
Laranda to Griffith. Everyone would have known about it. You
can't hide that sort of thing. It's not like it
was a bit like one of those American police shows
where you've got lines and lines of cars with flashing
lights coming up to arrest people at the house. So
we met up. I use my phone. By that stage,

(50:41):
we've got better mobile phones. I get onto the guy
who's running out dogs called Nico, and my target is
Tony Rameo. So we drive into Griffith, I catch up
with Nico. He then drives down to harm Would I
follow him where his dogs have got the Harmwood Catholic
clubs surrounded. It just happened to be a Sunday morning,

(51:04):
and it also just sappened that Antonio Ramia's daughter was
doing her confirmation ceremony.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
This is something straight out of with Mafia film. I
can see this now though Mafia. Dine's all sitting there,
the confirmation's going on there for one of those classic moments. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:19):
So the church service had finished and they had adjourned
to the Harnwood Catholic Club where it was like a
wedding reception. All the little girls in white pretty dresses,
all the little boys in little suits. They were all
sitting around these round tables feasting and celebrating the confirmation.
So when we arrive there, we walk up the steps

(51:40):
and walk into the foyer, we look like we've just
come out of the bush. I'm wearing my bloodstones jeans,
my army big army jacket, pretty much unkempt, sort of
looking sort of characters. So she sees up just about
dies as if like, what the hell is going on here?
So I was with a guy called Sully. He was
a sergeant in the New South Wales Police. He went

(52:03):
up to her to explain that we were here to
ad a few people who were in their reception room
and she didn't want a scene, so she wanted to
take everyone through the kitchen. So there was about six
of us there. So while he's dealing with her, I
just wander over to the two flapping doors and look
through the little glass panel to see what's going on

(52:23):
in there, and can I see him?

Speaker 1 (52:25):
And there he is.

Speaker 4 (52:26):
I can see Romeo sitting at the table with his
family and everyone's enjoying their reception and that sort of thing.
And when I turn back to say I can see him,
they're already heading off past the reception and they're going
to come in through the back door, so the door
from the kitchen that enters. They're going to go through
the kitchen and enter the reception room through the kitchen door.

(52:47):
I don't know why that's any less dramatic than just
swinging open the front doors. And you've worked on this
for two years. You're not coming through the back door.
You're making an entrance that definitely was not I hid
him in my sides and I wasn't going to let
him go. So I've seen them disappear, so I've said, nah,

(53:09):
I'm not doing that, gone through the swing doors.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
I've walked straight up to Tony.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
So he's I've walked halfway through the room and I
think at that time, no one's really noticed me yet,
you know, everyone's still enjoying themselves and whatever. In fact,
Tony Rameo hadn't seen me at all until I was
virtually standing next to him and I looked down him
and I said, are you Tony Romeo? And he's looking
at me. He goes yes. He had like a puzzled

(53:34):
look on his face. He's looked at me yes. And
I said, are you Tony Romeo?

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Of what one?

Speaker 4 (53:38):
What comes Avenue Griffith And he says, I said, stand up, mate,
you're under rest for drug trafficking. And I've grabbed him
under the arm and he sort of stood up as
if should I stand up or just sort of hesitating,
and I've sort of helped him up, and then I've
gone to get my handcuffs to handcuff his hands behind
his back, and I had no handcuffs because my handcuffs

(54:00):
were on a chieftain flying around somewhere in Northern Australia
because we'd planned them there as something for coal to
years if he needed to use handcuffs. So at that
time I've gone to get my handcuffs and not there.
I look around and Damien from offices running across. He's
come through the kitchen door. He's running across, which that
really grabbed everyone's attention, and he got his handcuffs out

(54:22):
and when we arrested him and was pretty straightforward.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
This really was the moment that the Romeo organization was
brought down in understand So, I mean he only got
like I think it was eight years in prison, eight
years on the bottom, and there was varying sentences, not
massive sentences for the amount of effort that had gone in.
But the intel that you'd gathered on him and the
organization really was a game changer, and I think it

(54:48):
helped law enforcement for years. But in particular it highlighted
what Tony Romeo was doing in his private life, which
may have been the catalyst for his murder In two
thousand and two. That's your theory. What did you find
out about it?

Speaker 4 (55:04):
Well, during the instigation, we knew that he was having
an affair with a waitress at a cafe called the
high View Cafe. He owned that in company with Rosario
Trimboli and rock Oromio, so the three of them owned
that and he had basically groomed her. She was only
just out of school, she was eighteen. He bought her
down to Melbourne and obviously they had some sort of

(55:25):
affair going on, but he was buying her jewelry, clothing.
He was giving her cash bonuses all the time. I mean,
this girl was earning like seven dollars an hour and
he'd be giving her five hundred dollars one thousand dollars.
It was big money at the time, but she'd come
up from a fairly poor family and for her that
helped the family pay the bills. He was also having

(55:46):
an affair with a lady on the Gold Coast, So
when we were doing the financial investigation into him, which
was conducted after his arrest, we found lots of moneytry
payments going towards her. He would fly her in and
out of Griffith when he want to meet up with her.
He was constantly holidaying with the family on the Gold Coast,

(56:09):
and I've got a feeling he wasn't at the beach
all the time. But we also found out that he
was having an affair with a lady whose name is Jennifer.
Jennifer was his sister in law. Now, Jennifer had had
an affair with a guy about a year earlier, a
guy called Rocco Barbara and old man mister Giovannie Sergei,

(56:32):
the head of the family. He found out, and he
wasn't really happy with Jennifer having an affair with mister Barbara.
So Jennifer didn't get into trouble herself because they're they're
not going to hurt her. But Rocco had an unfortunate
accident where he had his leg shot off with a shotgun.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
And self inflicted opposed it, yes, but somehow from behind yes,
So do you shoot yourself from behind them the knee?

Speaker 4 (57:03):
He shot himself from behind hind in the knee with
a shotgun and then called someone to take him to hospital,
where he then lost his leg. They had to amputate
what was left of it, but no one believed that story.
Everyone knew it was old man Surgery who wanted some
sort of revenge or saving a face for the family.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
I think disrespect is what gets you kills his situation.

Speaker 4 (57:28):
Yes, yes, you have to show respect. So during the
court hearings, let's call them and through the brief of evidence,
the family would have discovered that Romeo was also having
an affair with Jennifer. When he got out of jail
after serving his eight years, he did mention to someone
that he's going to have to be shot, but wasn't

(57:52):
concerned about it, as if like, oh, yeah, they probably
shoot me for having that affair. There must have been
something going on with that. But he was shot as
you described, he was shot actually was a peach tree,
was pre in peach tree, peach tree, and he was
shot once in the back in his back from a

(58:12):
distance and pretty much died straight away. He fell over
meaning a little bit and then yeah, he died.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
So there were thirty witnesses all around him in typical
mafia style, no one saw a thing.

Speaker 4 (58:26):
Almost almost. I think the guy right standing right next
to him had to admit he saw something, and what
he saw was he heard a shot and Romeo fell.
No one else heard anything though, and fair enough, they
don't want to get involved. But that really meant nothing.
You know, he wasn't going to get into trouble for saying, well,
I saw him shot and he fell down and there

(58:48):
was a noise from behind.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
And you know, typically this is a professional hit, obviously,
And I guess they'd learned from the killing of Donald McKay,
which was by Jimmy Baisley, where there was evidence left behind.
There was drag marks to the vehicle and all kinds
of stuff, and eventually all roads led back to Baslely
via the person who'd hired him to kill mackay. Yeah,
nothing was being left to chance in this day. I
believe that there was an assassin flown in from overseas.

(59:15):
Is that your understanding?

Speaker 4 (59:17):
No, that's been suggested. Look, it's possible. It's possible. I
couldn't say whether that's true or not. I would have
thought it'd just be someone locally that obviously they need
someone who can marksman of some sort.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
There were very few clues in this case. I guess
the most important one was a vehicle that had been
stolen sometime before had been set on fire after the killing,
so one would suggest that that was the vehicle used
as a getaway.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
Yeah, so the link was the day Romeo got out
of jail, was the day same day that car was stolen,
the day Romeo was shot with either that day or
the day after that car was found burnt out down
at there was another town further to the south.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Strong circumstantial link. Yeah, bit of a circumstantial link. So
whether it was actually the car taken by the crypt
to nick Off is another matter, but it is quite
possible someone was flowing in.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
But who really knows.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
All in all, this was a very high stakes operation
which came out pretty well in the end. I guess
you could say, but I think you would have like
slightly longer jail sentence of everyone. But yours will be
the third book, and there's many other accounts of this
as well. Thank you for sharing the story today.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Yeah, thanks, Adam, and I appreciate your time.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
And Pete, I should add that Peter with the reason
I won a Walkley Award. That's the story for another day.
We won't going to that one, but I think it's
fantastic you've told this story. And Peter is looking for
a publisher for betray that's the current title. If anyone
wants to get involved and publish the book, let me
know Adam Shanned writer at gmail dot com. Thank you
once again, Peter, this has been real crime with Adam

(01:01:00):
shann Thanks for listening.