Melbourne is the city that keeps winning awards for being the most pleasant place on earth to live. Tree-lined streets, world-class coffee, the smell of garlic and tomato drifting out of the restaurants on Lygon Street on a Friday night. That is the postcard. What the postcard does not show you is that the same few blocks have been the headquarters of a Calabrian secret society that arrived by ship in 1922 and never left.
It has outlasted almost every Australian alive today. And the crime family that the television cameras made famous, the one they called the Carlton Crew, was never the richest of them. It was never the most powerful. It was simply the loudest. The real empire in this story never wanted a television series.
Consider what we are actually dealing with here, a ship called the Re D’Italia docking in 1922, 91 stab wounds in the kitchen of a house in Fitzroy, 4.4 tons of ecstasy hidden inside cans labeled as Italian tomatoes, a criminal defense barrister who was secretly working for the police known to the courts only as Lawyer X, more than 1,000 criminal convictions thrown into doubt, and 120 million dollars of public money spent investigating it all resulting in not a single charge.
We went through the coronial inquests. We read the High Court ruling. We read all 1,008 pages of the Royal Commission report across its five volumes. We read the Supreme Court judgments that in the last 2 years have set free men the state of Victoria had already locked away. And by the end of this, you will understand the strangest part of the whole story.
You will understand why almost every man who ran Melbourne’s underworld is now dead or in prison, while the institution that broke the law in order to convict them has never spent a single day in a courtroom. To understand any of it, you have to go back a hundred years to a boat. In 1922, a vessel called the Re d’Italia arrived in Australia carrying, according to a 1965 intelligence report by an Australian security agent named Colin Brown, three reputed members of the Calabrian Mafia.
One of them, a man named Antonio Barbaro, nicknamed the Toad, made his way to Melbourne and set up the first cell of what the Italians call the Honored Society and what the rest of the world now calls the ‘Ndrangheta. This was the same decade that Al Capone was running Chicago. You have heard endless stories about the Mafia in New York and in the mountains of Sicily.
Almost no one outside Australia knows that the same organization stepped quietly off a boat in Melbourne at exactly the same time and then spent a century making sure you never noticed. What made Melbourne fertile ground was migration. After the Second World War, between the late 1940s and the 1970s, tens of thousands of Calabrians arrived from a handful of towns in the toe of Italy.
Places with names like Plati and San Luca and Sinopoli. They settled in the inner city suburb of Carlton, which became Melbourne’s Little Italy. And they gave the society something every criminal organization needs and money cannot buy. They gave it a community to hide inside. The first man to truly run it was Domenico Italiano, known to everyone simply as Il Papa, the Pope.
He came to Melbourne in 1930 and was recognized as the Godfather of the Melbourne arm of the Society with Barbaro the Toad as his enforcer and the violence began early. The first killing that Australian authorities ever publicly recorded as a Mafia hit happened in 1945 in Fitzroy when a relative of Italiano’s stabbed a man named Giuseppe Versace 91 times. 91.
The three men accused of it were all acquitted. That set a pattern you are going to see again and again in this story. The bodies are real. The convictions are not. Now, here is the question that matters. What was all of this actually for? What was the money machine? The answer was sitting in plain sight in the middle of the city.
Advertisements
It was the fruit and vegetable market. The Queen Victoria Market was where every piece of produce in Melbourne was bought and sold wholesale. And whoever controlled who could sell there and at what price controlled an enormous and entirely legal-looking river of cash. Under the Society’s grip, the produce passing through that market was valued at something in the region of 45 million dollars a year in the money of the time.
That is the empire. Not glamorous, not cinematic, crates of tomatoes and boxes of grapes. But whoever sat on top of it was quietly one of the most powerful men in the city. An empire’s built on a single choke point always end the same way. They end in a war of succession. When Il Papa, the Pope, died of natural causes in December of 1962 and his enforcer, the toad, died within weeks of him.
The seat at the top of the market was suddenly empty. What followed became known as the market murders. But here is the part that should bother you before we even get to the bodies. Everything I have just described, the society, the structure, the names, the extortion at the markets, was documented by a government report in 1964. An investigator named John Cusack brought in from the United States told the Victorian government in writing that an organized criminal society was operating across three Australian states, running extortion, illegal
gambling, sly grog, counterfeiting, and the smuggling of weapons. The government had the map. And then it filed the map away in a drawer. If you have ever pushed a shopping trolley through the Queen Victoria Market on a Saturday morning past the stalls of fruit and the men shouting prices, you have walked across what was, for 40 years, the single most contested patch of ground in the entire Australian underworld.
People died for the right to sell vegetables there. They died in a sequence. In April of 1963, a man named Vincenzo Angeletta, who had broken away to form his own faction, was shotgunned in his own driveway in Northcote. In January of 1964, the society’s money man, Vincenzo Muratori, was shot dead at half past 2:00 in the morning as he reversed his car out of his Hampton driveway on his way to the market.
Two days after that, another market seller, Antonio Monaco, was killed. And when the smoke cleared, a new godfather had consolidated control. His name was Liborio >> >> Benvenuto and he would run the Melbourne society from 1964 until his own natural death in 1988, 24 years at the top. He died in his bed. Almost none of the men in this story managed that, but the men who controlled those markets did their work in the shadows, the way the society always had.
The men who came next would be different. The men who came next wanted to be seen, and this is the moment to be honest with you about a phrase, because your instinct to question it is the right one. The Carlton Crew. It is a fantastic name. It has been the title of books and the engine of a hit television drama.
But here is what you need to understand. No Australian court has ever formally defined the Carlton Crew as a single criminal organization. The term was popularized by two Melbourne crime journalists, John Silvester and Andrew Rule, and it was burned into the national memory by a Channel 9 series called Underbelly.
It is a label. It is shorthand for a loose second-generation Italian-Australian clique that operated around Lygon Street from the late 1970s onward. This is a trap worth naming because we have walked into it before on this channel. If you watched my breakdown of the Dutch synthetic drug empire, the one with the $20 billion headline, you will remember the central lesson.
That $20 billion figure was a global street price estimate, not Dutch profit, and the so-called Mocro Maffia was never a single dynasty. It was a label that journalists hung on a loose network. The richest crime family in the Netherlands turned out to be a marketing phrase. Melbourne’s richest family collapses in exactly the same way when you push on it. The name is real.
The single, unified, fabulously wealthy dynasty behind the name is mostly a story we tell ourselves. So, let us look at the men the label was actually attached to. The first true face of it was Alphonse Gangitano, who styled himself the black prince of Lygon Street. And here’s your first contradiction. Gangitano was not a starving kid from the gutter.
He was educated at Catholic private schools. He came from comfort. What he wanted was not survival. It was the role. He built himself a cinematic gangster persona, ran protection rackets and nightclubs and fight nights, and he courted the very attention that men like Ben Venuto had spent 40 years avoiding. In 1995, he was charged with murdering a man named Gregory Workman at a party.
The charges collapsed when the two key witnesses, after a visit to a solicitor’s office, suddenly could not remember a thing. Around him, you had the other names that would become famous. Nick Gatto, a former heavyweight boxer and a veteran of the produce markets. Graham Kinniburgh, an old-school career criminal so capable that police nicknamed him The Munster and privately considered him one of the cleverest operators in the state.
Mario Condello, a disbarred solicitor who police alleged handled money for The Society. But here’s the question your sharper instinct is already asking. If these men were so rich, where is the money? And the honest answer is the most revealing thing in this entire story. The documented revenue of the Carlton Crew is, frankly, modest by the standards of a global crime empire.
It was illegal bookmaking. It was standover work, leaning on people for cash. It was nightclub interests, and in Gatto’s case, it was a business called arbitrations and mediations, which made its money inserting itself into disputes in the building industry and taking a cut to settle them. Gaetano, at his peak in the mid-1990s, was reportedly pulling in somewhere between 125,000 and 200,000 dollars a month.
That is serious money. It is a very good living. It is not, by two orders of magnitude, the kind of wealth the title of this video promises. There is street money. And then, far above it, there is market money. And then, far above even that, there is the kind of money that moves through shipping containers that nobody is ever supposed to open, because while the Carlton Crew was busy being photographed, a different operation was quietly becoming one of the largest drug enterprises the country had ever seen. It belonged to a man
named Tony Mokbel, and he called it, simply, The Company. The court records here are precise in a way the legend is not. A Victoria Police audit put Mokbel’s personal net worth at around 82,000 dollars in 1995. By 2001, it had grown to roughly 15 million. A single one of his drug laboratories was valued by police at 78 million dollars.
But here is what the television series left out, because a court only confirmed it later. Even Mokbel, for all his money, was not the top of the pyramid. To see who actually was, you You to look at one shipment. If you took an ecstasy pill in a Melbourne nightclub in 2007, there is a genuine chance it reached you inside a tin labeled as Italian tomatoes.
In June of that year, a shipping container arrived in Melbourne carrying around 4.4 tons of MDMA, 15 million tablets. They were packed inside more than 3,000 cans of tomatoes. At the time, it was the single largest seizure of ecstasy anywhere in the world. The Commonwealth prosecutors estimated its street value at approximately $440 million.
Let me give you a sense of that number because 440 million is hard to feel. That is more than the entire annual operating budget of some Australian government departments. It is the price of a major hospital. And it was sitting in a shipping container disguised as groceries. But here’s the shipment that exposed who was really at the top of the tree, and it was not anyone you have seen on television.
When the courts unpacked who was behind that container, the name at the apex was not Carlton Crew. It was a man named Pasquale Barbaro from the rural town of Griffith. And Barbaro was not a random importer. He was the son of a Calabrian clan that the Australian justice system had been circling for 30 years, a clan named in a 1970s Royal Commission over the assassination of an anti-drugs campaigner.
The judge who sentenced Pasquale Barbaro to life in prison with a minimum of 30 years told him directly that he had been at the very top of the tree in this country. The largest drug haul in Australian history was not a Carlton Crew job. It was a Calabrian and during had a job. The famous families were the customers and the distributors.
The century-old society was the wholesaler. So, while the importer stayed silent and grew rich, the men on the surface, the visible men, the men who liked the cameras, started shooting each other. And that is the war that Melbourne actually remembers. You will see this conflict described as the Melbourne gangland war, and you will see a body count attached to it.
And here, I have to be careful with you because the number itself is disputed. The most widely cited count from the journalists who covered it is 36 underworld figures killed between 1998 and 2010. Other careful counts put it at 27. What is not in dispute is that at least 27 men, and by some accounts as many as 36, were murdered in a little over a decade in a single Australian city over drugs and pride and revenge.
The trigger was almost petty. In October of 1999, on his 29th birthday, a man named Carl Williams was shot in the stomach by Jason Moran over a debt connected to a pill press. The wound did not kill him. What it did was start a war. Williams survived, and he set about systematically having the people he blamed killed.
What followed was a list of names and dates that Melbourne has not forgotten. Alphonse Gangitano, the black prince, shot dead in the laundry of his own home in 1998 in his underwear. A later coronial inquest placed two other men in that house on the night, but no one was ever convicted of his killing. Mark Moran, shot dead outside at home in 2000.
Graham Kinniburgh, the Monster, the cleverest of them all, shot just after midnight outside his home in 2003. Mario Condello, shot dead in his own driveway in 2006, on the very eve of the trial where he was due to face court. His barrister stood up the next morning and told the judge that his client would not be answering bail because he had been murdered the night before and that he had died confident of his acquittal.
I want to handle one of these killings with particular care because of what it tells you about who these men were. In June of 2003, Jason Moran and another man were shot dead at a children’s football clinic in front of a crowd of kids that included Moran’s own young twins. This channel does not glorify that.
There is no strategy to admire in shooting two men in front of children. I mention it only because it marks the moment the Melbourne public turned, the moment the city stopped seeing these men as colorful rogues and started demanding the killing stop. And that demand produced a police unit called the Purana Taskforce, set up in 2003.
Over its life, Purana listened to more than 300,000 intercepted phone calls. It laid charges in 15 murders. It seized something in the order of $70 million in assets. And its central target, eventually, was Carl Williams himself. In 2007, Williams pleaded guilty to three murders and a conspiracy to commit a fourth.
The judge who sentenced him to life with a minimum of 35 years called him a killer and a cowardly one. But here is what the timing of Carl Williams’s own death tells you, and it is the hinge of this entire story. On the 19th of April, 2010, Williams was sitting in a maximum-security prison reading a newspaper when another inmate beat him to death with part of an exercise bike.
He was struck eight times. It took prison staff around half an hour to even discover the body, and on the very morning he was killed, a Melbourne newspaper had revealed that Victoria Police were paying the school fees for Williams’ young daughter. They were paying those fees because Williams had agreed to become a witness against a corrupt former drug squad detective in connection with the execution of a police informer and his wife.
Six weeks after Williams was bludgeoned to death in his cell, the case against that detective collapsed because the chief witness was now dead. The visible families >> >> were now finished. Gatto, the Morans, Kinniburgh, Condello, Williams, dead. Mokbel, in prison. The cameras had their ending.
The good guys had apparently won. So, here’s the real question. If all of them are dead or in prison, who actually won? Because everything I have told you so far, the markets, the murders, the tomato tins, the gangland war, is the story Melbourne already knows. It is the story the television series told. What comes next is the part that the cameras never got to, the part that should genuinely unsettle you.
It involves a criminal defense barrister who was secretly informing on the very clients she was defending. It involves more than a thousand criminal convictions that the courts can no longer trust, and it involves a special investigator who spent $120 million of public money getting to the bottom of it, and who, in the end, charged absolutely no one.
Her name is Nicola Gobbo. She was a niece of a former governor of the state of Victoria from a respectable and prominent family. She signed the bar roll as one of the youngest women ever to do so, and she built a thriving practice as a criminal defense barrister. Her clients were the biggest names in this entire story. She represented Carl Williams.
She represented Tony Mokbel and his family. She represented men charged over that tomato tin shipment. And the entire time, she was a registered informer for Victoria Police. In her most active period between 2005 and 2009, she was in near daily contact with her police handlers, generating more than 5,000 intelligence reports.
She was sitting across the table from her clients, hearing their secrets under the protection of the oldest privilege in the legal system, and then she was telling the police. By her own later account, the information she provided led to nearly 400 arrests. When this finally came to light, it went all the way to the High Court of Australia, the highest court in the country, and seven judges considered it together.
I am going to quote their language directly, because it is not the language judges normally use. They found that Gobbo’s conduct was, in their words, fundamental and appalling. They found that Victoria Police had been guilty of reprehensible conduct and atrocious breaches of its duties. And they concluded that the prosecution of each of these convicted people had been corrupted in a manner that debased the fundamental premises of the criminal justice system.
The corruption did not come from the gangsters. It came from the people who were supposed to be catching them. This forced a royal commission, the most serious form of public inquiry Australia has. It ran for 2 years, and its final report was more than 1,000 pages long. The findings are staggering when you lay them out.
As many as 1,011 people may have had their convictions affected by the use of Nicola Gobbo. More than 100 Victoria police officers and staff knew that a practicing barrister was informing on her own clients, and not one of them reported it. The force spent 4 and 1/2 million dollars of public money in the courts simply trying to keep her role a secret.
Now, this pattern, an official inquiry exposing how an institution had been quietly captured by criminal interests, may sound familiar if you have been watching this channel for a while. When I covered the crime family that owns Montreal, I walked through the Charbonneau Commission, the enormous public inquiry that exposed how a slice of every public construction contract in that city, a skim documented down to the percentage in the back of a cafe, had been flowing to the mafia for 15 years.
That inquiry produced a report nearly 2,000 pages long, and the police operation that followed it, the one that was supposed to bring the charges, closed years later with no charges laid against the people at the top at all. Melbourne and Montreal are 9,000 miles apart, but the shape of the ending is identical.
The commission exposes everything, and then nothing happens to the powerful. Because here is what happened in Melbourne once the royal commission had done its work. The convictions began to fall. A man named Faruk Orman, who had spent 12 years in prison for a murder had his conviction quashed because Gobbo had been compromised.
And then, in the last 2 years, the biggest domino of all, Tony Mokbel, the man behind the company, had his convictions challenged on the basis that his own barrister had been informing on him. In 2025, the courts began dismantling the case against him. The prosecution ultimately abandoned the remaining charges. And Tony Mokbel, one of the most significant drug traffickers in Australian history, walked free because the state had cheated to convict him.
So, now we arrive at the number that defines this whole story. After the High Court used the words reprehensible and atrocious, after a royal commission found more than a thousand convictions in doubt, after men who were genuinely guilty had to be released because the police had broken the rules, the government set up an office of the special investigator led by a former High Court judge specifically to examine whether any of the police involved should face criminal charges.
That investigator said publicly that he had built a powerful case of offending. And then the public prosecutor declined to lay charges. The investigator warned he would resign if his briefs kept being rejected. The office was wound up. It had spent approximately 120 million dollars. And the number of police officers it succeeded in charging was zero. Not one.
Not one serving officer was charged. Nicola Gobbo herself was never criminally charged. She was struck off as a lawyer. She lost a civil lawsuit she brought against the state. And a judge found she had been a willing recruit rather than a victim, but she faced no criminal court. And in 2024, the government passed a law capping the compensation that the people wrongly affected by all of this could claim at $1 million each, protecting the state’s own finances from the consequences of its own misconduct.
And the society, the thing that started all of this on a boat in 1922, it is still here. It never went anywhere. The Australian Federal Police now speak openly about Italian organized crime networks laundering, in their words, multi-millions of dollars a day through the Australian economy. They describe more than a dozen confirmed ‘Ndrangheta clans operating in the country inside a wider web of dozens of Italian crime families.
The famous gangland war was a brushfire on the surface. The root system was never touched. You can see the living tail of it in the news today. If you have driven through one of Melbourne’s gleaming new road tunnels, part of the tens of billions of dollars the city is spending to rebuild itself, you have passed through an industry that a recent public inquiry says was quietly influenced by some of the same names from this story.
Mick Gatto, the former boxer who became the public face of the Carlton Crew after Gangitano died, is alive and at 70 years old, he is more in the news than he has been in two decades. An anti-corruption inquiry has examined his role and the role of his businesses in the construction sector and its dealings with a major union, with a barrister assisting that inquiry testifying that Gatto had made tens of millions of dollars from those dealings.
I want to be precise and fair here because these are allegations examined by an inquiry, not criminal convictions, and Mr. Gatto has in the past successfully defended his reputation in court and denies wrongdoing. But, the pattern is unmistakable. The money moved from the vegetable market to the drug container to the cranes building the city’s roads.
It simply changed costume, and the actual street violence in Melbourne today is not even Italian anymore. It is a war over illegal tobacco. Hundreds of firebombings of shops allegedly directed by a crime boss running things from overseas. The society does not need to fight that war. It takes its margin and stays quiet, exactly as it has done for 100 years. The surface is always loud.
The empire is always silent. So, here is what Melbourne actually is underneath the awards and the coffee. The city tells itself a gangland soap opera, colorful villains in nice suits who shot each other in driveways and restaurants until finally the police won and order was restored. That is the comforting version.
The real version is quieter, and it is worse. A secret society arrived a century ago and embedded itself in a community, and it never left. It moved from controlling crates of tomatoes to importing the largest drug shipments in the nation’s history to influencing the construction of the very infrastructure the city depends on.
The famous families, the Carlton Crew, the Morans, the Williams operation were never the empire. They were the surface of it. They rose. They grew arrogant. They overreached, and they died almost to a man in exactly the rise and ruin pattern these stories always follow. But, when the state finally moved decisively against that surface, it broke its own laws to do it.
And when that was exposed in the highest court in the land, the result was that the criminals walked free, and the institution that had corrupted the entire system was never charged with anything at all. The question worth asking is not how a 100-year-old secret society managed to survive and thrive inside the most livable city on Earth.
We know how. It survived because it was patient and because it stayed quiet and because it was useful. No. The question worth asking is the one the men in this story would understand better than anyone. You can put a gangster in the ground and the system simply promotes the next one. So, the real question is this.
