Organised crime appears out of control in Australia

Press, 26 April 1989, Page 20

Organised crime appears out of control in Australia

Colin Smith reports from Canberra after the

murder of one of the country’s top policemen

SOMEBODY ONCE said that turning Canberra into Australia’s capital was the ruin of a good sheep run. Away from the centre it often still has the feel of a country town, especially in suburbs like Deakin where there is enough vegetation in most front gardens to remind a visitor that it would not take long to return to bush. Almost all the light had gone by the time Colin Winchester got home. The assistant commissioner, known to his mates in the Australian Federal police as “The Dog,” parked in his elderly neighbour’s driveway in Lawley Street. It was an arrangement they had come to because she was nervous that, without a car in the drive, a burglar might assume that the place was unoccupied. As the man in charge of the capital’s police force for the last six months, Mr Winchester was only too aware of the increase in petty crime. Drugs were the root cause of it. There were too many people in town who didn’t have enough to pay for the heroin they craved. In the neighbour’s garden there is a spreading, thicktrunked gum tree. Next to the gum tree there are some bushes. The police think the gunman was waiting here. He was armed with an American sports rifle, a Ruger .22 semi-automatic that may have had the barrel shortened. Professionals are said to prefer .22s rather than large calibres because the victim doesn’t jerk so much and it is easier to get a second shot in. The first bullet hit Mr Winchester in the back of the head just behind the right ear as he opened the door of his white Ford. The second appears to have been fired at close range, the coup de grace to the temple which was probably unnecessary. The policeman slumped forward, half out of his seat. When his wife, Gwen, who had heard the car draw up, came out 10 minutes later to see why he hadn’t come in, she assumed he had had a heart attack and called an ambulance. It was not until she tried to give her husband the kiss of life that she felt the blood.

It is three months since the 55-year-old Colin Winchester, No. 5 in the Federal police hierarchy, became the most senior policeman ever to be murdered in Australia. Since then, reward notices have gone out offering sAust2so,ooo together with indemnity and witness protection including the possibility of "relocation” to any accomplice, “not being the person who actually caused his death or person principally involved in the instigation of the murder.” So far there have been no takers.

It is widely assumed in Canberra that Mr Winchester was assassinated by a hit man employed by a gang of Italian criminals who have become the

Australian version of the Mafia. This gang come in the main from the district of Calabria in the toe of Italy and like the Mafia their secret society was originally a peasants’ resistance movement.

Some Italians refer to it as La Famiglia (The Family) or L’Onorata Societa (the Honourable Society). In the Calabrian dialect, it is the N’Dranghita, which has no ready translation into English. In recent years they have made millions of dollars in Australia out of drugs, prostitution, illegal betting and the mass fixing of horse races.

They sometimes work in conjunction with Chinese Triad gangs based in Hong Kong and Singapore, the organised criminal elements from the Lebanese community, which in some cases have been in Australia longer than the Italians, the Melbourne Greeks and the Turks. The power of their money is such that they have been able

to corrupt politicians, the judiciary and policemen. Those they cannot buy or intimidate they occasionally kill. There is growing belief that neither the Federal nor the State Governments in Australia have the desire or the resources to take on organised crime.

table and fruit garden.

“If the will to succeed has existed, some of the governments of this country appear to have lost heart and have 'given up the fight — that is if it was ever taken on,” declared Mr Justice Philip Woodward in a recent article in the “Australian,” where he went on to say: "Even in the past 10 years, the situation has become progressively worse and the disclosures that are being made almost daily support the theory that things are getting worse.”

Mr Justice Woodward’s expertise on organised crime dates from 1977 when he headed a Royal Commission into the narcotics trade after the disappearance of a prominent anti-drugs crusader called Donald Mackay. Two spent .22 cartridge cases were found near Mackay’s bloodsplattered vehicle at a hotel car park in his home town of Griffith in New South Wales, a predominantly Italian community of some 14,000 people about 480 km from Canberra. In 1977, Mr Justice Woodward concluded that Griffith was a centre of marijuana growing and organised crime. Twelve years on, he thinks it probably still is. This is like discovering that one of the hubs of the British underworld is Chipping Norton in the picturesque Cotswolds.

The first wave of Italians came in the 19205. They were mainly northerners from Verona. During World War II most of them were interned and all 96 names on the 1939-45 memorial are Anglo-Cel-tic. It was not really until after the war that the Calabrians began to arrive. The local English-speaking Aussies, now very much in the minority around Griffith, call them (not without affection) “The Calos." There has been some inter-marrriage between them and people told me that the only inter-communal strife in Griffith was generally between the Calos and the Aboriginals. But it was also true that the

northern Italians did not have much time for the southerners. “Most of the Italians here are good, hard-working people,” said Mrs Barbara Mackay, whose husband’s body has never been found. “They have a strong sense of family and there’s very low usage of the welfare system on their part.”

She didn’t want to talk about La Famiglia. She hadn’t really got time and she had talked about it so much in the past. Politicians are always ready to talk about it, she said, but few people seemed willing to do anything, did they? Four years after her husband vanished, Colin Winchester directed a clandestine police operation which, quite by chance, led to the conviction of the man who was said in court to have killed Mackay for a fee of about SUS9OOO.

Griffith is named after a former Minister of Public Works. In all fairness, it should be called McKinney after the irrigation engineer who badgered an apathetic State Government to allow him to steer the waters of the Murrumbidgee River. Over the years the results have been spectacular. A hard living area, prone to drought, was transformed into a huge vege-

Both policemen and reporters seem to agree that Col Winches-

ter, as he was most often referred to in the news columns, was a straight copper. Yet, perhaps inevitably, there was talk after Mr Winchester's death that N’’Dranghita would never dare kill a high-ranking policeman unless they considered he had betrayed them. There was a persistent rumour that the assistant commissioner had somehow managed to pocket some of the marijuana profits from the undercover operation he was involved in. A few days ago, in order to dispel these rumours, the Federal police announced that independent auditors examining the bank accounts of Mr Winchester and his wife had found “nothing untoward.”

Mr Winchester was a former coalminer who came from a bush town called Captains Flat, which is just outside the capital territory in' New South Wales. His father was the town baker there and after he left school at 15 he worked down the mines until he was 29 when he joined the old Australian Capital Territory Police. His nickname "The Dog" is said to come from his mining days, "because he was always yapping.”

At the time of his death Colin Winchester was thought to have been tipped off about the activities of some corrupt police in a state force. Whether these sort of rumours were enough to get him killed may never be known.

A senior officer in the Australian Federal police said he would not accept a notion that N’Dranghita would not kill policemen. It might be like that in the United States where the Mafia had been entrenched for several generations and was more sophisticated, he explained, but in Australia they were dealing with first generation at most. Every year, he said, he went to a conference on organised crime in the United States which was also attended by Italian delegates. And almost every year somebody he had met from the Italian side last time had been killed. Of course, it wasn't as bad as Northern Ireland yet but since Col’s death they are all taking precautions. Copyright — London Observer Service

Many believe the Government does not want to take on crime

In the last 10 years things have continued to get worse