The inside story of a father and son's eight-year east coast rampage. Rory Callinan reports.
Even from his earliest years growing up in Bambaroo, a sleepy sugar-cane farming settlement in Far North Queensland, Gino Stocco was known as a mischief-maker.
Nearly 50 years on, relatives still chuckle about the gag the curly-haired youngster played on his primary teacher at his tiny bush school.
Rebelling under the new master's strict discipline, Gino urinated into the inkwell in the teacher's desk and left the stinking mess there to be found mid-lesson.
Accounts differ over what unfolded when the incensed master complained to Gino's parents. 
Some say his mother, Egidia, just laughed while Gino's father, Peter, says he walloped the boy so hard he bolted for the hills and didn't come back for hours.
Whatever the consequences, Gino's disregard for authority remained undaunted to the point where he and his son, Mark, ended up on top of Australia's most-wanted list. Few are laughing at his high jinks any more.
For the past eight years, the 57-year-old former cane cutter has allegedly, along with 35-year-old Mark, a failed engineering university student and AWOL army recruit, been able to mount a two-man crime wave through the backblocks of Australia's eastern states committing robberies, arson attacks and assaults and taking payback vandalism to a scale never before seen.
Exploiting the kindness of country residents the two, who often masquerade as caretakers, have supposedly destroyed houses, sheds, machinery, stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and defrauded employers for the smallest of slights or rejection of one of their strange requests.
They have conducted their alleged crimes largely nocturnally with a sick diligence, like using a battery-operated drill to puncture nearly 100 vehicle tyres in one attack, or cutting scores of fences in another.
They are accused of emptying troughs, tanks, pesticide containers, fuel drums, flooding houses, holing water pipes and destroying pumps, starving stock and contaminating feed to get back at their employers.
And until they were arrested at Dunedoo in western NSW on Wednesday they had escaped police chases, allegedly bashing at least one police officer and in recent months shooting and ramming police cars in broad daylight like modern-day bushrangers while eluding paramilitary law enforcement squads, helicopter patrols, detective taskforces and local vigilantes.
The damage and the emotional trauma they are accused of causing under the noses of a seemingly impotent police force left townsfolk in such a despairing state that some hoped the Stoccos would be "brought out in body bags".
"It sounds bad but I will be the one dancing when they do," a traumatised Queensland victim said before the arrests.
So how did a poorly educated farmhand go from class clown to becoming one of Australia's most wanted along with his middle-aged university-educated son - and why were the pair able to freakishly dodge capture?
Gino Stocco was the second son of Italian migrants Peter and Egidia who had left their family home in Veneto, north-east Italy, and moved to a dusty block of cane-farming land at Ingham in far North Queensland in 1955.
Peter still lives in a small house just south of Ingham where he spent decades carving out a living working in the cane and building industries and he still speaks in heavily Italian-accented English.
His phone has been ringing off the hook with journalists demanding to know about his son who he says had a problem with authority from the start.
"He wouldn't listen to me. I would try and tell him how but he knew," Peter said. "The teachers told us he was smart, but he didn't want to be told."
He doesn't want to go into detail other than to confirm he tried to take Gino to a psychiatrist when he was young but Gino refused. A less sanitised version of Gino's life, however, is told by family friends who agreed to speak anonymously.
They tell of an intelligent young man who could at times be a hard worker but hated taking orders, and didn't care about education, instead choosing to work the cane fields and in the winter join relatives in Victoria and pick vegetables around Werribee.
One year in the late 1970s he returned from Victoria with a bright red Ford Falcon V8 and and a girl called Connie who was from a well-known Sicilian vegetable-farming family in Werribee.
He and Connie were quickly married in a traditional wedding held in Ingham and they based themselves in Bambaroo where they had a son, Mark, and a daughter, Christina.
The family built houses and established a roadhouse fruit shop with a distinctive sculpture of a big melon built by Peter.
While the big melon attracted some notoriety, it was Gino who attracted more - for pilfering. His alleged MO varied but usually it revolved around entering a shop or business to buy something and then filching something else more valuable.
"One time he went to get tyres in Townsville and came back with four extra ones, another time it was a piece of machinery from a hardware in town," the friend says.
Another less than clever act still talked about involved Gino allegedly snatching farm machinery from the display area of a hardware store in Ingham - but it required a special key to be activated.
Gino was fingered as the thief after he went back into the shop demanding to buy a key, a local familiar with the case says.
Police confronted him and he revealed it was in a nearby creek, but the owners of the hardware store never pressed charges after the machinery was retrieved.
His children seemed immune to their father's mindset, with both gaining entry to university and Mark being recalled as a solid student with a gift for remembering numbers. He went on to complete three years of an electrical engineering degree at James Cook University.
While the children appeared on the verge of success, Gino and Connie moved to a property in Toowoomba where neighbours described them as obliging and polite, but they were baffled to see the unemployed Gino holding garage sales every second week with expensive farm equipment. Then, in about 2002 as Mark neared the end of his university degree, Connie and Gino's marriage shattered - a break-up friends say was caused by his misbehaviour and lies about reforming. The break-up sent Gino crazy.
"He was mad. He was mad in the head," his father, Peter, recalls, pointing up to his forehead. "He married the wrong woman."
According to a Stocco family friend, Gino responded by travelling to Werribee where Connie had moved and pasting up leaflets featuring slanderous and false information about his ex-wife around the local shopping centre. The letters were printed in English and Italian and he did a mail-out of the correspondence to relatives.
The old nonna of Connie's family didn't go shopping for a month because she was so embarrassed, the friend says. Efforts to contact Connie were unsuccessful.
Strangely, while Gino was losing it over a woman, Mark had forged a steady relationship with an attractive blond fellow student, his uni mates say.
But perhaps influenced by his father, Mark became possessive and domineering, and the relationship ended.
Distraught, Mark then joined the army but lasted only 13 days in basic training before taking off with Gino.
It was the last Mark's uni friends saw of him until his media appearance as one of the country's most wanted.
By the mid-2000s Gino and Mark had become nomadic and highly unpredictable and were rarely sighted in Ingham. But when they did show up it's alleged that drums of pesticide and fuel stored in unsecured farm sheds would go missing.
In summer, they would head south to avoid the heat and work down in Victoria and in winter they would come back, sometimes all the way to North Queensland.
In 2004, Mark launched a bizarre attack on Connie's family in Hoppers Crossing, a fringe suburb in Melbourne's outer west. He approached her mother in the car park of a shopping centre, pushed her to the ground and stole her handbag.
Family and friends had no idea of the pair's whereabouts until sometime in the mid-2000s when out of the blue a relative from the old country rang the Ingham Stocco clan to report they were in Italy, visiting family.
In 2006, they popped up again on a yacht called the Kiwarrak which they had bought from a NSW man, using the proceeds of Gino's divorce settlement.
Over the course of a year, the pair sailed from NSW down the coast of Victoria, over to Tasmania and then back to South Australia, leaving a trail of fraud victims in their wake as they visited Adelaide, Tasmania's Huon River, Kangaroo Island, Port Fairy and Apollo Bay.
In mid-  December in 2006, the Stoccos sailed into Port Fairy and moored in the river. On   December 21, the harbour authorities noted the yacht's departure without mooring fees being paid and it coincided with $3000 missing from a break-in at the Port Fairy yacht club.
In 2007, their nautical adventures came to an end after authorities caught up with them in Apollo Bay. The consequences cannot be mentioned for legal reasons. But within two years the Stoccos were back to their old habits - this time on land. For the next six years they allegedly went on a bizarre rampage, taking extraordinary measures to avoid capture.
They travelled only at night in allegedly stolen vehicles that had false plates and were kept in immaculate condition to avoid suspicion. They had caches of equipment and food which they used if they were being hunted. They would turn up for caretaker jobs looking tidy and honest but would quickly revert to slovenly habits, leading farmer Doug Redding to say they "stank like polecats".
Moved on from caretaking jobs after a minor disagreement, they would allegedly take revenge, disappearing late in the night and then returning to burn sheds, hole water tanks, drill punctures in tyres on every vehicle on the property, cut fences and contaminate feed. On one Queensland property, where they had briefly worked, they allegedly holed or drained or damaged anything related to water. When police looked for fingerprints it appeared the whole property had been wiped clean.
Mark rarely said much. The exception seemed to be when they were caretakers at Redding's home where he recalled hearing them go off on bizarre conspiratorial rants about the government, the failure of South Sydney Rugby League team to win games and, of course, the police who they hated.
From 2011, in Queensland, there were alleged thefts at Drillham and Garbutt and an evasion of police at Stanthorpe.
The next year they are alleged to be have committed a crime in Atherton in north Queensland, then a burglary near Yuleba. A month later they were sighted in the same area with more alleged stealing offences.
The list of alleged offences also include a notable attack in 2014 involving a farm machinery shed burned down near the Stoccos' old family property at Bambaroo. Coincidentally, the shed belonged to a former schoolmate whose wife had been supportive of Connie when she divorced Gino.
While they were not known for their confrontations, the longer they stayed on the run, the more they upped the stakes.
Earlier this year they allegedly bashed a policeman in western Queensland who tried to arrest them for shoplifting. When police tried to intercept their vehicle near Wagga Wagga on   October 16, they allegedly let fly with a shot into the car. A second bullet was allegedly fired, and police backed off.
When they were finally apprehended at Dunedoo in NSW on Wednesday, after a well publicised two-week manhunt across two states, an even more disturbing alleged crime was added to the list: murder.
The small farming block where they were caught was known to the Stoccos, as was the occupant, Rosario Cimone, 68, whose body was found in a shallow grave nearby.
Cimone had been linked to a multimillion-dollar marijuana crop in the early 2000s, but now the Stoccos have been charged with his murder.
They face an additional 34 charges between them, including obtaining property by deception and discharging a firearm with intent to resist arrest. There's likely to be more to come.