KEITH MOOR IN A NEW BOOK REVEALS THE INSIDE STORY OF THE BUST OF 4 TONNES OF ECSTASY IN MELBOURNE
As police involved in the world's biggest ecstasy bust waited for the order to kick down the door, they were as confident as they could be that those occupying the apartment would be asleep.
Those about to execute the raid had the element of surprise in their favour so meeting resistance was much less likely, which further boosted their confidence. And they were aware from a major surveillance operation the day before that the five people inside had only been in bed for a few hours after hitting the bottle hard the previous night.
Australian Federal Police bosses had been waiting for more than a year to arrest those responsible for importing 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy into Melbourne. They brought in the big guns - the AFP's elite Operations Response Group - for the pre-dawn raid on the apartment rented by Australian Calabrian Mafia boss Pasquale Barbaro for his Melbourne mistress, Sharon Ropa. While Barbaro's home was his mansion in Griffith, NSW, he spent a lot of time shacked up with Ropa in Victoria - unbeknown to his dutiful Italian wife and four children. 
Heavily armed AFP agents threw in flash grenades, which set off loud bangs and flashes of light to mimic a hail of bullets, as they smashed their way into the Little Palmerston St unit through the front and back doors about 4am - which must have done wonders for the hangovers those inside the flat were suffering after attending a funeral and the inevitable wake the night before.
Barbaro's cousin Pasquale Sergi, who came down from Griffith for the Melbourne funeral, was also arrested during that raid. He tried to hide in a bedroom cupboard, which, strangely enough, didn't fool the AFP agents responsible for searching and securing the premises. Ropa was naked in bed with Barbaro in the master bedroom when AFP agents burst in. Police raided Barbaro's Griffith mansion at the same time as they were smashing their way into his love nest. Ever tactful, officers who spoke to Barbaro's wife in Griffith that day didn't mention the naked circumstances of her husband's arrest.
It's difficult to imagine that little old Melbourne is where the world's biggest ecstasy haul was made, but it's true. It's also difficult to imagine there are still people in Australia who doubt the existence of the Calabrian Mafia here - but that's true too. I have had access to several confidential reports prepared by Australian and Italian law-enforcement agencies, ASIO spies and US Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that should convince even the most ardent of doubters that the Calabrian Mafia is a major organised crime player in Australia. Those documents have never been released, but their contents are revealed in "Busted" and they paint a graphic picture of the history of the Calabrian Mafia in Australia. Calabria is in the toe of southern Italy and is the world headquarters of the Italian organised crime gang 'Ndrangheta, which is known by some Italians as L'Onorata Societa (the Honoured Society) or La Famiglia (The Family).
It is simply called the mafia by most in Australia, or the Calabrian Mafia to differentiate it from the traditional Sicilian Mafia.
'Ndrangheta eclipsed the Sicilian Mafia in the late 1990s to become the most powerful crime syndicate in Italy. The Calabrian Mafia has a tight clan structure, often involving members marrying relations and sons taking over from ageing fathers to "keep it in the family", which has made it difficult for law enforcement to penetrate. The secret society has cells all over the world and has had a strong presence in Australia since at least the 1930s.
It has been responsible for growing and distributing much of Australia's marijuana for decades. It also got involved in heroin importations in 1979, through now-dead crime boss Robert Trimbole, and is known to have been involved in massive cocaine and ecstasy importations into Australia since at least 2000. Just as it is important to have knowledge of the Calabrian Mafia to better understand the inside story of the world's biggest ecstasy bust, it is equally important to know the backgrounds of the main players charged over the 4.4-tonne shipment. Those players include Barbaro, Ropa, Saverio Zirilli, Rob Karam, John Higgs and Francesco Madafferi.
Easily the biggest of those players - and the undoubted leader of the gang responsible for importing tonnes of drugs into Australia - was Barbaro.
By the time of his 2008 arrest over the world's biggest ecstasy bust, Barbaro was a senior Calabrian Mafia boss of international standing in the worldwide Italian secret society, and one of the biggest drug dealers Australia has ever produced. It was Barbaro, through his senior role in the Calabrian Mafia, who had the international connections to give him access to tonnes of drugs through the Belgium-based Aquino Calabrian Mafia syndicate. Barbaro was in regular contact with senior members of at least three of the world's biggest international drug smuggling syndicates.
One of Barbaro's contacts was an English criminal based in Asia who had strong connections to Chinese triad gangs; another was a Belgium-based Calabrian Mafia syndicate responsible for shipping tonnes of cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs around the world; a third was a syndicate that specialised in making the world's best-quality ecstasy in super labs near the Belgium-Netherlands border. Senior players in each of the three gangs treated Barbaro with incredible respect, a clear indication the international syndicate members considered Barbaro to be a major player on the world drug-smuggling stage.
One of the Mr Bigs of international organised crime that Barbaro was dealing with was important enough to be picked up by a government-plated Porsche in Cambodia after meeting Barbaro, and was then afforded the luxury of a police motorcycle escort to take him to his next appointment.
Cambodian police surveillance officers were following Barbaro at the request of the AFP at the time. Those Cambodian surveillance officers were stunned when the man left the meeting with Barbaro and stepped into the waiting Porsche. The undercover cops watched as the Porsche, escorted by four police motorcycles, whisked the man away in style.
Such is the level of corruption in Cambodia that the AFP was never able to establish why Barbaro's mate got such special treatment, but they suspect it was because the man was so big in organised crime that he was paying bent Cambodian officials for protection from prosecution. The Mr Big being given the chauffeur treatment is an old and very tall British crook who is known in the underworld by the nicknames "Long" and "Stretch".
AFP agents were able to establish his identity, but at the time of writing in 2016 neither they nor any other law-enforcement agency had been able to charge him with the international drug dealing and money laundering they know he is a major player in.
The AFP knew - because it had been bugging and following Barbaro for months - that Barbaro was planning a number of major drug importations to get money to make up for what he lost when the AFP seized his 4.4-tonne ecstasy shipment in Melbourne in 2007.
He needed to make $10 million to compensate the Belgium-based Calabrian Mafia cell that had paid for the 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy, but Barbaro was also keen to keep drug dealing to make more than just the $10 million he owed to the Europeans.
Drug dealing was his main source of income - and he had expensive tastes, as well as a wife and family and at least one mistress to support.
Although the AFP had been gathering evidence against Barbaro and his gang since the 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy was seized in   June 2007, it was holding off on making arrests following that 2007 seizure because bugged conversations and other intelligence led them to believe Barbaro was well advanced in plans for several more major drug importations to Australia.
That is why the AFP arranged for police in Cambodia, as well as police in various parts of Europe, to secretly follow Barbaro during his overseas trips.
After the   June 2007 ecstasy seizure, but well before the   August 2008 arrests of Barbaro and his crew, the AFP sent agents to Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands to pass on information to police there about the people in Europe that Barbaro was dealing with.
The Dutch and Belgian police were interested in the information the AFP had about where the ecstasy that found its way to Australia in tomato tins was made, who made it and who paid for it to be made and shipped to Melbourne. That information was that the Belgium-based Calabrian Mafia Aquino family clan ordered and paid for the 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy and arranged to take it by truck from the Belgium-Netherlands border region to Naples in Italy for shipment to Melbourne, and that ecstasy-making Mr Big Adrianus "Janus" Van Wesenbeeck manufactured the ecstasy for the Aquino clan.
Van Wesenbeeck is considered by international law enforcement agencies to have been one of the biggest drug manufacturers and traffickers in the world, and the Aquino syndicate was one of the world's biggest buyers and smugglers of drugs until several senior members of it were arrested in recent years.
A senior member of the syndicate, Silvio Aquino, was one of those arrested in Europe for his role in helping to organise the 4.4-tonne shipment of ecstasy to the Pasquale Barbaro gang in Melbourne in 2007.
A Belgian court jailed him for four years on   March 21, 2014, for his role in the shipment to Australia. Aquino was murdered on   August 27, 2015 in Limburg; his attackers ambushed the car he and his wife were in and shot him in the head.
Van Wesenbeeck and Aquino clan members have strong connections to Australia, with Barbaro being in regular contact with the Aquinos, and Van Wesenbeeck having been linked to a previous ecstasy importation to Sydney, as well as later shipments that went to Barbaro.
Although the AFP was not able to prove beyond reasonable doubt where the ecstasy seized during the world's biggest ecstasy bust was packed into tomato tins and how it got from Van Wesenbeeck's super lab on the Belgium-Netherlands border to Naples, information gained after the event, from informers and elsewhere, strongly suggested the tablets were packed in a Calabrian Mafia-owned cannery in Belgium and then driven by truck from Belgium to Naples.
Busted: The Inside Story of the World's Biggest Ecstasy Haul and How the Australian Calabrian Mafia Nearly Got Away With It by Keith Moor, published by Penguin, rrp $35