For a retired mafia godfather, Pasquale "Peter'' Barbaro lived a remarkably quiet and nondescript life in the Brisbane suburbs.
That was until hitmen came calling. Not once but twice.
Barbaro's neighbours in Condamine Street, Runcorn, thought the unassuming 58-year-old was a retired council employee from Canberra who had settled in Brisbane for a relaxing life with his young Filipino bride. The couple had a five-year-old daughter and kept to themselves.
Everything was not as it seemed though.
Barbaro had been the boss of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell until he ran afoul of the criminal organisation.
Fearing for his life, he started giving information to the National Crime Authority in 1989 in secretly recorded interviews.
Some of it pertained to the 1984 mafia murders of Melbourne gangsters Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Medici's ears were cut off before both bodies were dumped in the Murrumbidgee River near the Calabrian mafia enclave of Griffith in NSW.
Barbaro's first address in Brisbane was at Daisy Hill, where in April 1989, as he lay in bed watching television with his 27-year-old wife, someone fired a shotgun through a window and hit Barbaro in the left shoulder.
Barbaro ran and was hit with a second shotgun blast in the right shoulder. Somehow he survived but thought a change of address might save his life.
The Barbaros moved to Condamine Street, but they weren't hard to find, even though they erected barbed wire security fences around the Runcorn house.
At 6am on March 18, 1990 Barbaro went out to get his Sunday paper and was just coming back inside through the garage door when his wife heard angry voices on the front lawn.
She looked out the window to see her husband having a loud argument in Italian with a long haired man with jeans and a heavy dark beard.
The argument lasted for about three minutes before the stranger abruptly ended all discussion by stabbing Barbaro in the shoulder and shooting him through the chest with a handgun.
One witness who lived opposite the murder scene, said Barbaro's wife had been hysterical, pleading with the gunman not to shoot her husband. He said after the gunman performed his execution, he calmly walked away leaving Barbaro lying in a pool of blood in the gutter and "looked like nothing had worried him at all''.
Other witnesses saw the same man – this time clean shaven with short hair - "looking smug and satisfied'', driving off in a cream-coloured 1970s Ford Falcon.
The car had been bought from a newspaper ad a week earlier and was found dumped at Mellor Street, Woodridge an hour after the killing. Police immediately suspected Barbaro's assailant was a hitman with a wig and fake beard.
Barbaro had told the police after the first assassination attempt that when a murder victim was shot as well as stabbed, it indicated he had done something "forbidden".
The Courier-Mail reported Barbaro's extensive links with organised crime in Australia and Italy. He was part of a multi-million-dollar crime syndicate with tentacles stretching around the world, though he lived a remarkably humble lifestyle.
The pensioner was born in the Mafia stronghold of Plati in the Calabrian region of Italy and while living in Canberra came under the notice of police in the early 1980s as a "person of influence''.
At the time of the first attempt on Barbaro's life, a federal Mafia expert said it was believed his death had been ordered because he had divorced his well-connected Italian wife, to take up with a younger woman.
"We have been told Barbaro has dishonored the Honored Society,'' the expert said.
"That honor can only be repaid with blood; that it does not matter how long it takes, it will be done.''
Canberra police records include references to how, over the years, Barbaro always had an eye for the ladies and was often seen going to Canberra motels with women other than his wife.
Police believed the execution probably had much more to do with Barbaro spilling his guts about what he knew regarding mafia murders and the large scale cultivation of marijuana in remote areas of Queensland and NSW.
Among the several senior Melbourne mafia figures who Barbaro identified to the National Crime Authority was a man police suspected of killing Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Barbaro told detectives that Victorian mafia boss Liborio Benvenuto had been involved in the killing of Medici and Furina in retaliation for one or both of them blowing up Benvenuto's car.
By the time the NCA began interviewing Barbaro in July 1989 he had already given Queensland police valuable information about the murders of four Melbourne men, including Medici and Furina, and named the Calabrian mafia bosses in various states and rural centres in Australia, including Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton.
Barbaro also provided the names of the Calabrian mafia's major marijuana growers.
In March this year, The Herald Sun newspaper reported that it had seen hundreds of pages of transcripts of the secretly taped conversations between NCA officers and Barbaro.
In one, Barbaro said there were about 3000 Calabrian mafia members in Australia, but most were followers.
"You can destroy quickly when you send two, three dozen people out of the country," Barbaro was recorded saying.
"New generation sick and tired. New generation want different life. When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia."
Barbaro was also taped in Brisbane giving details to the NCA about the murder of Griffith mafia figure Angelo Licastro while on holiday in Plati in 1982. The holiday had been arranged by a Griffith rival who also ordered the killing.
The NCA's last taped interview with Barbaro was on January 23, 1990, seven weeks before his murder.
There were also reports that Barbaro had been talking to the NCA about the killing of Colin Winchester, the Assistant Commissioner in the Australian Federal Police.
Barbaro's Brisbane murder was linked with at least another 20 killings in the previous 12 years.
The victims either knew Barbaro or his associates or had some dealings with them.
The murders occurred in Queensland, NSW and Victoria and in Italy where at least five victims were Australian Italians making "business visits''.
In 1980, Barbaro and other members of associated families were involved in a flood of third party insurance claims for whiplash injuries caused by nose-to-tail collisions.
Despite extensive investigations, Barbaro's killer was never found.
Five years after the murder police had to admit that the gunman had covered his tracks so well that they "didn't have a clue'' about his identity and Brisbane Coroner, Mr Gary Casey SM, recommended to the Justice Department that it would be a waste of resources to hold an inquest because, on the evidence, there was no reasonable chance anyone would be brought to justice.
Retired NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small says the mafia activities in Queensland go back as far as the 1920s when migrants from Calabria set up protection rackets on the cane fields of the north, killing and maiming if they did not get what they wanted.
"From the early 1970s the Calabrian mafia became involved in the drug trade through Robert Trimbole in Griffith and then moved their activities north,'' Small told me, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
Pasquale Barbaro died in a gutter in a Runcorn street in 1990 but his name lives on.
A grandson, also named Pasquale Barbaro, survived a murder attempt on Balmain Rd in Sydney last year when a gunman fired six shots at him.
Another relative, also named Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while sitting in a van next to underworld figure Jason Moran, as they watched a kids football training session.
And yet another Pasquale Barbaro was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years' jail over the world's biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
- By Grantlee Kieza, The Courier-Mail, August 17, 2016
-----
The long-term head of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell, Pasquale "Il Principale" Barbaro, was shot dead in 1990 only weeks after becoming an NCA informer.
Barbaro didn't know it, but the authority had secretly taped discussions with him.
The Herald Sun has seen copies of transcripts in which Barbaro named 28 of Australia's Calabrian mafia bosses.
Barbaro was murdered before he could testify against the mafia bosses he had identified.
By: Keith Moor, Hearld Sun, October 30, 2006
------
Video - The Australian Mafia
That was until hitmen came calling. Not once but twice.
Barbaro's neighbours in Condamine Street, Runcorn, thought the unassuming 58-year-old was a retired council employee from Canberra who had settled in Brisbane for a relaxing life with his young Filipino bride. The couple had a five-year-old daughter and kept to themselves.
Everything was not as it seemed though.
Barbaro had been the boss of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell until he ran afoul of the criminal organisation.
Fearing for his life, he started giving information to the National Crime Authority in 1989 in secretly recorded interviews.
Some of it pertained to the 1984 mafia murders of Melbourne gangsters Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Medici's ears were cut off before both bodies were dumped in the Murrumbidgee River near the Calabrian mafia enclave of Griffith in NSW.
Barbaro's first address in Brisbane was at Daisy Hill, where in April 1989, as he lay in bed watching television with his 27-year-old wife, someone fired a shotgun through a window and hit Barbaro in the left shoulder.
Barbaro ran and was hit with a second shotgun blast in the right shoulder. Somehow he survived but thought a change of address might save his life.
The Barbaros moved to Condamine Street, but they weren't hard to find, even though they erected barbed wire security fences around the Runcorn house.
At 6am on March 18, 1990 Barbaro went out to get his Sunday paper and was just coming back inside through the garage door when his wife heard angry voices on the front lawn.
She looked out the window to see her husband having a loud argument in Italian with a long haired man with jeans and a heavy dark beard.
The argument lasted for about three minutes before the stranger abruptly ended all discussion by stabbing Barbaro in the shoulder and shooting him through the chest with a handgun.
One witness who lived opposite the murder scene, said Barbaro's wife had been hysterical, pleading with the gunman not to shoot her husband. He said after the gunman performed his execution, he calmly walked away leaving Barbaro lying in a pool of blood in the gutter and "looked like nothing had worried him at all''.
Other witnesses saw the same man – this time clean shaven with short hair - "looking smug and satisfied'', driving off in a cream-coloured 1970s Ford Falcon.
The car had been bought from a newspaper ad a week earlier and was found dumped at Mellor Street, Woodridge an hour after the killing. Police immediately suspected Barbaro's assailant was a hitman with a wig and fake beard.
Barbaro had told the police after the first assassination attempt that when a murder victim was shot as well as stabbed, it indicated he had done something "forbidden".
The Courier-Mail reported Barbaro's extensive links with organised crime in Australia and Italy. He was part of a multi-million-dollar crime syndicate with tentacles stretching around the world, though he lived a remarkably humble lifestyle.
The pensioner was born in the Mafia stronghold of Plati in the Calabrian region of Italy and while living in Canberra came under the notice of police in the early 1980s as a "person of influence''.
At the time of the first attempt on Barbaro's life, a federal Mafia expert said it was believed his death had been ordered because he had divorced his well-connected Italian wife, to take up with a younger woman.
"We have been told Barbaro has dishonored the Honored Society,'' the expert said.
"That honor can only be repaid with blood; that it does not matter how long it takes, it will be done.''
Canberra police records include references to how, over the years, Barbaro always had an eye for the ladies and was often seen going to Canberra motels with women other than his wife.
Police believed the execution probably had much more to do with Barbaro spilling his guts about what he knew regarding mafia murders and the large scale cultivation of marijuana in remote areas of Queensland and NSW.
Among the several senior Melbourne mafia figures who Barbaro identified to the National Crime Authority was a man police suspected of killing Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Barbaro told detectives that Victorian mafia boss Liborio Benvenuto had been involved in the killing of Medici and Furina in retaliation for one or both of them blowing up Benvenuto's car.
By the time the NCA began interviewing Barbaro in July 1989 he had already given Queensland police valuable information about the murders of four Melbourne men, including Medici and Furina, and named the Calabrian mafia bosses in various states and rural centres in Australia, including Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton.
Barbaro also provided the names of the Calabrian mafia's major marijuana growers.
In March this year, The Herald Sun newspaper reported that it had seen hundreds of pages of transcripts of the secretly taped conversations between NCA officers and Barbaro.
In one, Barbaro said there were about 3000 Calabrian mafia members in Australia, but most were followers.
"You can destroy quickly when you send two, three dozen people out of the country," Barbaro was recorded saying.
"New generation sick and tired. New generation want different life. When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia."
Barbaro was also taped in Brisbane giving details to the NCA about the murder of Griffith mafia figure Angelo Licastro while on holiday in Plati in 1982. The holiday had been arranged by a Griffith rival who also ordered the killing.
The NCA's last taped interview with Barbaro was on January 23, 1990, seven weeks before his murder.
There were also reports that Barbaro had been talking to the NCA about the killing of Colin Winchester, the Assistant Commissioner in the Australian Federal Police.
Barbaro's Brisbane murder was linked with at least another 20 killings in the previous 12 years.
The victims either knew Barbaro or his associates or had some dealings with them.
The murders occurred in Queensland, NSW and Victoria and in Italy where at least five victims were Australian Italians making "business visits''.
In 1980, Barbaro and other members of associated families were involved in a flood of third party insurance claims for whiplash injuries caused by nose-to-tail collisions.
Despite extensive investigations, Barbaro's killer was never found.
Five years after the murder police had to admit that the gunman had covered his tracks so well that they "didn't have a clue'' about his identity and Brisbane Coroner, Mr Gary Casey SM, recommended to the Justice Department that it would be a waste of resources to hold an inquest because, on the evidence, there was no reasonable chance anyone would be brought to justice.
Retired NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small says the mafia activities in Queensland go back as far as the 1920s when migrants from Calabria set up protection rackets on the cane fields of the north, killing and maiming if they did not get what they wanted.
"From the early 1970s the Calabrian mafia became involved in the drug trade through Robert Trimbole in Griffith and then moved their activities north,'' Small told me, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
Pasquale Barbaro died in a gutter in a Runcorn street in 1990 but his name lives on.
A grandson, also named Pasquale Barbaro, survived a murder attempt on Balmain Rd in Sydney last year when a gunman fired six shots at him.
Another relative, also named Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while sitting in a van next to underworld figure Jason Moran, as they watched a kids football training session.
And yet another Pasquale Barbaro was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years' jail over the world's biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
- By Grantlee Kieza, The Courier-Mail, August 17, 2016
-----
The long-term head of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell, Pasquale "Il Principale" Barbaro, was shot dead in 1990 only weeks after becoming an NCA informer.
Barbaro didn't know it, but the authority had secretly taped discussions with him.
The Herald Sun has seen copies of transcripts in which Barbaro named 28 of Australia's Calabrian mafia bosses.
Barbaro was murdered before he could testify against the mafia bosses he had identified.
By: Keith Moor, Hearld Sun, October 30, 2006
------
Video - The Australian Mafia
For a retired mafia godfather, Pasquale "Peter'' Barbaro lived a remarkably quiet and nondescript life in the Brisbane suburbs.
That was until hitmen came calling. Not once but twice.
Barbaro's neighbours in Condamine Street, Runcorn, thought the unassuming 58-year-old was a retired council employee from Canberra who had settled in Brisbane for a relaxing life with his young Filipino bride. The couple had a five-year-old daughter and kept to themselves.
Everything was not as it seemed though.
Barbaro had been the boss of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell until he ran afoul of the criminal organisation.
Fearing for his life, he started giving information to the National Crime Authority in 1989 in secretly recorded interviews.
Some of it pertained to the 1984 mafia murders of Melbourne gangsters Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Medici's ears were cut off before both bodies were dumped in the Murrumbidgee River near the Calabrian mafia enclave of Griffith in NSW.
Barbaro's first address in Brisbane was at Daisy Hill, where in April 1989, as he lay in bed watching television with his 27-year-old wife, someone fired a shotgun through a window and hit Barbaro in the left shoulder.
Barbaro ran and was hit with a second shotgun blast in the right shoulder. Somehow he survived but thought a change of address might save his life.
The Barbaros moved to Condamine Street, but they weren't hard to find, even though they erected barbed wire security fences around the Runcorn house.
At 6am on March 18, 1990 Barbaro went out to get his Sunday paper and was just coming back inside through the garage door when his wife heard angry voices on the front lawn.
She looked out the window to see her husband having a loud argument in Italian with a long haired man with jeans and a heavy dark beard.
The argument lasted for about three minutes before the stranger abruptly ended all discussion by stabbing Barbaro in the shoulder and shooting him through the chest with a handgun.
One witness who lived opposite the murder scene, said Barbaro's wife had been hysterical, pleading with the gunman not to shoot her husband. He said after the gunman performed his execution, he calmly walked away leaving Barbaro lying in a pool of blood in the gutter and "looked like nothing had worried him at all''.
Other witnesses saw the same man – this time clean shaven with short hair - "looking smug and satisfied'', driving off in a cream-coloured 1970s Ford Falcon.
The car had been bought from a newspaper ad a week earlier and was found dumped at Mellor Street, Woodridge an hour after the killing. Police immediately suspected Barbaro's assailant was a hitman with a wig and fake beard.
Barbaro had told the police after the first assassination attempt that when a murder victim was shot as well as stabbed, it indicated he had done something "forbidden".
The Courier-Mail reported Barbaro's extensive links with organised crime in Australia and Italy. He was part of a multi-million-dollar crime syndicate with tentacles stretching around the world, though he lived a remarkably humble lifestyle.
The pensioner was born in the Mafia stronghold of Plati in the Calabrian region of Italy and while living in Canberra came under the notice of police in the early 1980s as a "person of influence''.
At the time of the first attempt on Barbaro's life, a federal Mafia expert said it was believed his death had been ordered because he had divorced his well-connected Italian wife, to take up with a younger woman.
"We have been told Barbaro has dishonored the Honored Society,'' the expert said.
"That honor can only be repaid with blood; that it does not matter how long it takes, it will be done.''
Canberra police records include references to how, over the years, Barbaro always had an eye for the ladies and was often seen going to Canberra motels with women other than his wife.
Police believed the execution probably had much more to do with Barbaro spilling his guts about what he knew regarding mafia murders and the large scale cultivation of marijuana in remote areas of Queensland and NSW.
Among the several senior Melbourne mafia figures who Barbaro identified to the National Crime Authority was a man police suspected of killing Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Barbaro told detectives that Victorian mafia boss Liborio Benvenuto had been involved in the killing of Medici and Furina in retaliation for one or both of them blowing up Benvenuto's car.
By the time the NCA began interviewing Barbaro in July 1989 he had already given Queensland police valuable information about the murders of four Melbourne men, including Medici and Furina, and named the Calabrian mafia bosses in various states and rural centres in Australia, including Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton.
Barbaro also provided the names of the Calabrian mafia's major marijuana growers.
In March this year, The Herald Sun newspaper reported that it had seen hundreds of pages of transcripts of the secretly taped conversations between NCA officers and Barbaro.
In one, Barbaro said there were about 3000 Calabrian mafia members in Australia, but most were followers.
"You can destroy quickly when you send two, three dozen people out of the country," Barbaro was recorded saying.
"New generation sick and tired. New generation want different life. When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia."
Barbaro was also taped in Brisbane giving details to the NCA about the murder of Griffith mafia figure Angelo Licastro while on holiday in Plati in 1982. The holiday had been arranged by a Griffith rival who also ordered the killing.
The NCA's last taped interview with Barbaro was on January 23, 1990, seven weeks before his murder.
There were also reports that Barbaro had been talking to the NCA about the killing of Colin Winchester, the Assistant Commissioner in the Australian Federal Police.
Barbaro's Brisbane murder was linked with at least another 20 killings in the previous 12 years.
The victims either knew Barbaro or his associates or had some dealings with them.
The murders occurred in Queensland, NSW and Victoria and in Italy where at least five victims were Australian Italians making "business visits''.
In 1980, Barbaro and other members of associated families were involved in a flood of third party insurance claims for whiplash injuries caused by nose-to-tail collisions.
Despite extensive investigations, Barbaro's killer was never found.
Five years after the murder police had to admit that the gunman had covered his tracks so well that they "didn't have a clue'' about his identity and Brisbane Coroner, Mr Gary Casey SM, recommended to the Justice Department that it would be a waste of resources to hold an inquest because, on the evidence, there was no reasonable chance anyone would be brought to justice.
Retired NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small says the mafia activities in Queensland go back as far as the 1920s when migrants from Calabria set up protection rackets on the cane fields of the north, killing and maiming if they did not get what they wanted.
"From the early 1970s the Calabrian mafia became involved in the drug trade through Robert Trimbole in Griffith and then moved their activities north,'' Small told me, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
Pasquale Barbaro died in a gutter in a Runcorn street in 1990 but his name lives on.
A grandson, also named Pasquale Barbaro, survived a murder attempt on Balmain Rd in Sydney last year when a gunman fired six shots at him.
Another relative, also named Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while sitting in a van next to underworld figure Jason Moran, as they watched a kids football training session.
And yet another Pasquale Barbaro was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years' jail over the world's biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
- By Grantlee Kieza, The Courier-Mail, August 17, 2016
-----
The long-term head of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell, Pasquale "Il Principale" Barbaro, was shot dead in 1990 only weeks after becoming an NCA informer.
Barbaro didn't know it, but the authority had secretly taped discussions with him.
The Herald Sun has seen copies of transcripts in which Barbaro named 28 of Australia's Calabrian mafia bosses.
Barbaro was murdered before he could testify against the mafia bosses he had identified.
By: Keith Moor, Hearld Sun, October 30, 2006
------
Video - The Australian Mafia
That was until hitmen came calling. Not once but twice.
Barbaro's neighbours in Condamine Street, Runcorn, thought the unassuming 58-year-old was a retired council employee from Canberra who had settled in Brisbane for a relaxing life with his young Filipino bride. The couple had a five-year-old daughter and kept to themselves.
Everything was not as it seemed though.
Barbaro had been the boss of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell until he ran afoul of the criminal organisation.
Fearing for his life, he started giving information to the National Crime Authority in 1989 in secretly recorded interviews.
Some of it pertained to the 1984 mafia murders of Melbourne gangsters Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Medici's ears were cut off before both bodies were dumped in the Murrumbidgee River near the Calabrian mafia enclave of Griffith in NSW.
Barbaro's first address in Brisbane was at Daisy Hill, where in April 1989, as he lay in bed watching television with his 27-year-old wife, someone fired a shotgun through a window and hit Barbaro in the left shoulder.
Barbaro ran and was hit with a second shotgun blast in the right shoulder. Somehow he survived but thought a change of address might save his life.
The Barbaros moved to Condamine Street, but they weren't hard to find, even though they erected barbed wire security fences around the Runcorn house.
At 6am on March 18, 1990 Barbaro went out to get his Sunday paper and was just coming back inside through the garage door when his wife heard angry voices on the front lawn.
She looked out the window to see her husband having a loud argument in Italian with a long haired man with jeans and a heavy dark beard.
The argument lasted for about three minutes before the stranger abruptly ended all discussion by stabbing Barbaro in the shoulder and shooting him through the chest with a handgun.
One witness who lived opposite the murder scene, said Barbaro's wife had been hysterical, pleading with the gunman not to shoot her husband. He said after the gunman performed his execution, he calmly walked away leaving Barbaro lying in a pool of blood in the gutter and "looked like nothing had worried him at all''.
Other witnesses saw the same man – this time clean shaven with short hair - "looking smug and satisfied'', driving off in a cream-coloured 1970s Ford Falcon.
The car had been bought from a newspaper ad a week earlier and was found dumped at Mellor Street, Woodridge an hour after the killing. Police immediately suspected Barbaro's assailant was a hitman with a wig and fake beard.
Barbaro had told the police after the first assassination attempt that when a murder victim was shot as well as stabbed, it indicated he had done something "forbidden".
The Courier-Mail reported Barbaro's extensive links with organised crime in Australia and Italy. He was part of a multi-million-dollar crime syndicate with tentacles stretching around the world, though he lived a remarkably humble lifestyle.
The pensioner was born in the Mafia stronghold of Plati in the Calabrian region of Italy and while living in Canberra came under the notice of police in the early 1980s as a "person of influence''.
At the time of the first attempt on Barbaro's life, a federal Mafia expert said it was believed his death had been ordered because he had divorced his well-connected Italian wife, to take up with a younger woman.
"We have been told Barbaro has dishonored the Honored Society,'' the expert said.
"That honor can only be repaid with blood; that it does not matter how long it takes, it will be done.''
Canberra police records include references to how, over the years, Barbaro always had an eye for the ladies and was often seen going to Canberra motels with women other than his wife.
Police believed the execution probably had much more to do with Barbaro spilling his guts about what he knew regarding mafia murders and the large scale cultivation of marijuana in remote areas of Queensland and NSW.
Among the several senior Melbourne mafia figures who Barbaro identified to the National Crime Authority was a man police suspected of killing Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina.
Barbaro told detectives that Victorian mafia boss Liborio Benvenuto had been involved in the killing of Medici and Furina in retaliation for one or both of them blowing up Benvenuto's car.
By the time the NCA began interviewing Barbaro in July 1989 he had already given Queensland police valuable information about the murders of four Melbourne men, including Medici and Furina, and named the Calabrian mafia bosses in various states and rural centres in Australia, including Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton.
Barbaro also provided the names of the Calabrian mafia's major marijuana growers.
In March this year, The Herald Sun newspaper reported that it had seen hundreds of pages of transcripts of the secretly taped conversations between NCA officers and Barbaro.
In one, Barbaro said there were about 3000 Calabrian mafia members in Australia, but most were followers.
"You can destroy quickly when you send two, three dozen people out of the country," Barbaro was recorded saying.
"New generation sick and tired. New generation want different life. When you send three, four dozen people out, no more mafia in Australia."
Barbaro was also taped in Brisbane giving details to the NCA about the murder of Griffith mafia figure Angelo Licastro while on holiday in Plati in 1982. The holiday had been arranged by a Griffith rival who also ordered the killing.
The NCA's last taped interview with Barbaro was on January 23, 1990, seven weeks before his murder.
There were also reports that Barbaro had been talking to the NCA about the killing of Colin Winchester, the Assistant Commissioner in the Australian Federal Police.
Barbaro's Brisbane murder was linked with at least another 20 killings in the previous 12 years.
The victims either knew Barbaro or his associates or had some dealings with them.
The murders occurred in Queensland, NSW and Victoria and in Italy where at least five victims were Australian Italians making "business visits''.
In 1980, Barbaro and other members of associated families were involved in a flood of third party insurance claims for whiplash injuries caused by nose-to-tail collisions.
Despite extensive investigations, Barbaro's killer was never found.
Five years after the murder police had to admit that the gunman had covered his tracks so well that they "didn't have a clue'' about his identity and Brisbane Coroner, Mr Gary Casey SM, recommended to the Justice Department that it would be a waste of resources to hold an inquest because, on the evidence, there was no reasonable chance anyone would be brought to justice.
Retired NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small says the mafia activities in Queensland go back as far as the 1920s when migrants from Calabria set up protection rackets on the cane fields of the north, killing and maiming if they did not get what they wanted.
"From the early 1970s the Calabrian mafia became involved in the drug trade through Robert Trimbole in Griffith and then moved their activities north,'' Small told me, adding that by the 1990s mafia-controlled marijuana was the second most lucrative crop in Queensland behind sugar cane.
Pasquale Barbaro died in a gutter in a Runcorn street in 1990 but his name lives on.
A grandson, also named Pasquale Barbaro, survived a murder attempt on Balmain Rd in Sydney last year when a gunman fired six shots at him.
Another relative, also named Pasquale Barbaro, was shot dead during the Melbourne gangland wars in 2003 while sitting in a van next to underworld figure Jason Moran, as they watched a kids football training session.
And yet another Pasquale Barbaro was sentenced in 2012 to 30 years' jail over the world's biggest ecstasy bust in Melbourne.
- By Grantlee Kieza, The Courier-Mail, August 17, 2016
-----
The long-term head of the Calabrian mafia's Canberra cell, Pasquale "Il Principale" Barbaro, was shot dead in 1990 only weeks after becoming an NCA informer.
Barbaro didn't know it, but the authority had secretly taped discussions with him.
The Herald Sun has seen copies of transcripts in which Barbaro named 28 of Australia's Calabrian mafia bosses.
Barbaro was murdered before he could testify against the mafia bosses he had identified.
By: Keith Moor, Hearld Sun, October 30, 2006
------
Video - The Australian Mafia
Inscription
QUI RIPOSA
PASQUALE BARBARO
IL PRINCIPALE
NATO A PLATI R.C. ITALIA
IL 28-11-1931
E MORTO A BRISBANE
IL 18-3-1990.
RIPOSA IN PACE.
Sponsored by Ancestry
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