The 'Ndrangheta's role in organised crime often tends to be overlooked
On the morning of   March 6, 1934, an Italian barber, 46-year-old Nicola Mamone, was walking with a friend in Innisfail, Queensland, when a man came up behind them and shot Mamone six times. The killing made headlines across Australia. Locals had no doubt that it was the work of a "Black Hand society" that had been terrorising them for many months.
The killer, Giovanni Iacona, was quickly caught and committed for trial. The murder was connected to an extortion racket in which local cane farmers had been threatened with the burning of their crops if they refused to pay up. After an argument that resulted in Mamone cutting off both Iacona's ears, Iacona had taken revenge by shooting Mamone dead. He reportedly told the police: "He cut off my ears. He made a job of me, but I made a better job of him." The extortion of Queensland cane growers did not end with Iacona's act of murder. Taking advantage of an immigration system that was not just poorly administered but corrupt, Mafia godfathers in Australia recruited new members from Calabria, enabling cells to be established in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Griffith and elsewhere. 
Three decades later, after a spate of Mafia killings in Melbourne that became known as the Victoria Market murders, a worried Victorian government commissioned a report from a US organised crime expert, John Cusack, on Mafia activities in Australia. Cusack's conclusions were unequivocal: "The Calabrian L'Onorata Societa (the Honoured Society)," he wrote, "is well entrenched in Australia." It was engaged in "extortion, prostitution, counterfeiting, sly grog, breaking and entering, illegal gambling and the smuggling of aliens and small arms". If unchecked, it was "capable of diversification into all -facets of organised crime and legitimate business".
Today, more than 90 years after the arrival of the first Black Hand members in Australia, the Calabrian Mafia - now known as the 'Ndrangheta, to distinguish it from the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra - has deeper and more extensive Australian roots than ever. A series of reports by the Italian anti-Mafia authorities confirms the seemingly irresistible rise of the 'Ndrangheta at the expense of its Sicilian and Neapolitan rivals. The relentless growth of the 'Ndran-gheta in Italy is mirrored by its growth overseas.
The ambition of the Australian 'Ndrangheta was dramatically illustrated by the 2007 seizure of 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy tablets from a consignment of Italian tinned tomatoes that arrived at Port Melbourne. After 61/2 years of court proceedings the head of the Australian network, Pasquale Barbaro, and his co-conspirators were convicted and jailed last year for a total of almost 300 years.
The seizure - which became famous as the world's biggest ecstasy bust - was a costly setback for the 'Ndrangheta, but business carried on regardless. In just six months, under the noses of law enforcement, Barbaro and his group, under surveillance prior to arrest, went on to obtain and distribute more than a million ecstasy tablets from a supplier in Sydney.
The Sydney middleman was arrested and jailed, but the importation network remains in business.
Speaking after Barbaro's arrest in 2008, the then Australian Federal Police commissioner, Mick Keelty, said that the global Calabrian Mafia syndicate was involved in 60 per cent of all drug importations into southeast Australia. While researching our book Evil Life, former NSW police assistant commissioner Clive Small and I found no evidence that the power of the 'Ndrangheta had waned since that statement was made.
The high prices paid for illicit drugs in this country make Australia an extremely profitable place to do business, and the 'Ndrangheta, drawing on deep familial ties established over nearly a century, has positioned itself to take maximum advantage.
Thirty-one Mafia families in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia have business connections with the nine leading 'Ndrangheta families in Plati, San Luca, Sinopoli and Africo, from where the bulk of Calabrian migration to Australia originated.
Visiting Australia last year, the University of Essex criminologist Anna Sergi warned that the 'Ndrangheta continued to be involved in "very large" importations of drugs overseen by a "chamber of control in Australia that holds the others together and reports back to the Calabrians".
Criminal gangs tend to have brief lives, their common interests undone by hubris, greed or treachery. The 'Ndrangheta has been responsible for more murders and violence in Australia than any other criminal organisation and still plays a key role in the growth of organised crime and corruption. How has it not just survived in Australia but thrived?
The 'Ndrangheta has never had the field to itself. Other criminal gangs (for example those led by Lennie McPherson and George Freeman in Sydney, and by Carl Williams in Melbourne) have come and gone. But only the 'Ndrangheta has survived through the decades, one criminal generation succeeding another, exploiting new opportunities while reinforcing old traditions.
Unlike other gangs, whose strength and legitimacy lay in the charisma and ruthlessness of their bosses, the resilience of the 'Ndrangheta in Australia, just as in Calabria, resides in a collective determination to survive. Individual leaders must, by definition, be ephemeral: the institutional control of the 'Ndrangheta has always outlasted the individuals in whom leadership is temporarily vested. â€ƒDespite its professed values of loyalty and honour, the 'Ndrangheta has not been immune from assassinations and betrayals. As far back as the 1920s, bitter internal rivalries within Australian cells were settled with a bullet to the head. To the 'Ndrangheta, there was no statute of limitations on co-operation with the police: reprisals could and sometimes did take place years after the offence. No individual was bigger than the organisation, however, and so the organisation - with its traditions and rules, its operational memories, its strategic ambitions - survived periodic betrayals, largely inoculated against the internal pressures that caused the downfall of rival gangs.
During the 70s and 80s, after the 'Ndrangheta-ordered murder of Donald Mackay, the Woodward royal commission into drug trafficking shone a light on the organisation's involvement in the cannabis trade, allowing the Australian public to glimpse the truth behind the "grass castles". Periodic law-enforcement crackdowns have followed. But none has come close to unpicking the family ties that are the source of its power.
Shifting law-enforcement priorities in Australia and overseas - above all, the increasing focus on counter-terrorism - have played into the hands of the 'Ndrangheta.
A year after 9/11, the AFP closed its liaison post in Rome. Documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws revealed that Australia's ambassador to Italy had secretly warned the government that closing the Rome office would compromise the fight against the Mafia. The ambassador, Murray Cobban, told the AFP that its decision to close the post was "seriously wrong on a whole-of-government basis" and would "not sit well with the Italians".
Nicola Gratteri, an Italian prosecutor specialising in the internationalisation of the Calabrian Mafia, claimed in 2011 that the closure of the AFP office in Rome continued to damage multinational investigations and warned that without regular meetings between Australian investigators and their Italian counterparts it was impossible to establish the mutual trust needed to combat the 'Ndrangheta. Gratteri confirmed that the Calabrian Mafia maintained an elaborate Australian network, with bosses in most major cities reporting to the organisation's senior leaders in southern Italy. Nobody could become a Mafia boss in Melbourne without being approved by bosses in Calabria.
In the movie The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey's character says, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." For most of the past 90 years the 'Ndrangheta has not had to convince Australians that it did not exist because politicians and law enforcement agencies have saved it the trouble.
In a memo written in 1972 - just five years before the execution of Mackay - the soon-to-be prime minister Gough Whitlam wrote of his "contempt" for the "latest sensation-mongering about the so-called Mafia". Australian politicians had been mouthing the same formula since the 30s.
In 1995, the National Crime Authority confidently declared that it could find no evidence in Australia of an "Italian organised crime group that can be identified, in the Italian sense, as 'Ndrangheta, Mafia or Camorra".
Although 'Ndrangheta-based cells existed in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, "their primary purpose appears to be sociocultural rather than criminal, more akin to clans and fraternities", it claimed.
Not a single police commissioner dissented from this conclusion, which would have come as news to many people - not least US Mafia expert John Cusack, the staff of the Woodward royal commission; the Italian anti-Mafia authorities and the few 'Ndrangheta rollovers in Australia who had provided information about the structures and operations of the organisation - and often paid for it with their lives.
A year after the AFP office in Rome was shut down, the newly constituted Australian Crime Commission (which replaced the National Crime Authority) produced a report on what it called "Italo-Australian organised crime".
The commission found that there was "no reason" to revisit the 1995 NCA finding of "only minimal information suggesting any form of ongoing criminal links between IOC figures in Australia and overseas-based Italian organised criminals".
The new report went further, stating that while organised crime in general was not declining, "the ethnic paradigm of Italo-Australian organised crime was dissipating".
By 2007, the 'Ndrangheta was estimated to have an annual revenue of between â‚¬35 billion and â‚¬40bn, or about 3.5 per cent of the gross domestic product of Italy.
Four years later the ACC released a report titled "Organised Crime in Australia". The 103-page document was supposed to provide "government, industry and the public with information they need to better respond to the threat of organised crime, now and into the future".
After 16 years of obfuscation, omission and outright denial, the 2011 report finally acknowledged that the 'Ndrangheta had "an Australian footprint" - and not only a footprint but "an estimated annual turnover of $60bn". No explanation for this startling about face has ever been offered.
Two years later, the ACC reported that what it called " 'Ndrangheta transnational Australian groups" posed an extreme risk to Australia. Yet this report has remained confidential.
Over the decades the 'Ndrangheta has worked assiduously - and with surprising success - to ingratiate itself with Australia's main political parties.
Although the organisation has been unable to replicate the brazen advocacy it could once count on from the corrupt Labor MP Al Grassby, in recent years the Calabrian Mafia has been able to grease palms and make friends on both sides of the political fence.
By establishing links with both parties, the 'Ndrangheta in Australia has insured itself against aggressive scrutiny and surveillance by either.
A few years ago, amid allegations that the Liberal Party had accepted Mafia-linked donations to block the deportation of Francesco Madafferi - now serving 10 years for trafficking in a commercial quantity of ecstasy - a source close to the Liberals told us a party insider was heard to quip: "Let them (the Labor Party) start throwing rocks, because our (dirt) files are bigger than theirs."Evil Life: The True Story of the Calabrian Mafia in Australia, by Clive Small and Tom Gilling, was published this week by Allen & Unwin ($32.99).