“Muratore family;
I do rite this letter in English as I want your kids to read your roten old man robed my father in the market. You did live good with money you robed of us in a good house when we are poor through you and we work hard. Take your kid in Calabria when you was poor and living like a dirty rat when you had nothing and were poor to go back to Calabria and live like a dirty criminal. But no go in the market and rob like your father did from a poor family like us
Signed, One whose family was robed by you”
-a handwritten letter delivered to the house of Vincenzo Muratore shortly after his murder, which John T. Cusack included in his report, “The Italian Criminal Society in Australia”.
Over decades, Calabrian criminals had built up and ruled over extortion rackets based in the Queen Victoria Markets of Melbourne, Victoria. As such, before Domenico “The Pope” Italiano and his sotto-capo and enforcer Antonio “The Toad” Barbaro were even buried (both dying of natural causes in 1962), their market interests had been absorbed by their fellow mobsters. A period of uncertainty would, however, have to be hastily rectified, as unrest is obviously bad for business.
Hence, the ‘leadership’ void in their Melbourne based ‘ndrine would be quickly filled by Domenico DeMarte, who had married into the Italiano family. Elevated into this position, he was a part of the cadre of succesful commission agents and merchants that Italiano had, for the most part, surrounded himself with. Men such as Michele Scriva (related through marriage), Vincenzo Muratore, Gregorio Sesto, Francesco Cammorotto, Carmelo Pellegrino, Giuseppe and Francesco Madafferi (*NOT that Frank*) and Liborio Benvenuto. These men, who had all been described as Italiano associates, seemed content enough for DeMarte to assume the role.
For the sake of illustration, Cusack listed some of the intricate marital webs that are a common feature amongst the ‘ndrine. Domenico DeMarte, for example, was married to The Pope’s niece. Michele Scriva married one of Italiano’s daughters, another of which was married to a nephew of Salvatore Maranita, who was himself married to a sister of Vincenzo Angilletta’s wife. A sister of DeMarte’s was wed to Giuseppe Carbone, who is named as being the leader of a cell based in NSW. In turn, Carbone’s sister was married to Adelaide boss Domenico Romeo. While not a complex a web as some Griffith families, it’s still a task to chart the links.
A respected member in very good standing himself, DeMarte also stood with the decidedly brutal “muscle” faction; he, Scriva, Cammorotto and Barbaro had displayed themselves as comfortable with exerting extreme violence; between them were multiple charges of assault, battery and at least one *proven* murder. Cusack is also perhaps the first to quantify the structure of the ‘ndrine or cell; the coba-bastone at the top, Muratore descibed as ‘contabile’ or ‘accountant’. Along with the sotto-capo or underboss, they comprise a selection of trusted figures who oversee operations.
In a very hesitant inference, one could also speculate on the role future leaders were playing at the time; men like Ross Gangemi, Bebbe Manariti and the much maligned fruiterer, Antonio Madafferi. Giuseppe Arena, known by the pleasant sobriquet “Joe, the Friendly Godfather”, who was gunned down in a very unfriendly fashion. There are also the countless siblings and offspring who were being raised in this milieu to consider; Alfonso Muratore, truly his father’s son; Frank Benvenuto and his brother Vince, frustrated heir apparent; Gaetano Scriva, the future lawyer and money-launderer extraordinaire, Mick Italiano, the grandson who died during climax – these tell the next chapter in the Victorian saga. But not before their fathers carved their piece.
With the support of being the majority, the extortionists masquerading as legitimate commission agents for the countless growers and produce markets had quietly assumed their control.
Domenico DeMarte, born 28th of , 1922, had arrived in Melbourne in 1938 aboard the San Remo, having come from the Calabrian town of Delianova. In 1945, he, Michele Scriva (who would also marry into the Italiano family) and another mobster named Domenico Pezzimenti had been arrested over the murder of a well-known Melbourne-based standover man, known as Giuseppe “Fat Joe” Versace. According to a police report, Versace had made several unwelcome advances towards the sister of a woman he was living with at the time; a woman with links to Scriva’s family. After being confronted by the men, the report alleged that an argument broke out, whereupon Versace drew a pistol but was subsequently stabbed some ninety times, though Pezzimenti would admit to stabbing Versace only eight times.
Astonishingly, in light of the admission, all were acquitted on grounds of self-defence, as Versace was well-known as a violent thug with a predilection for carrying an automatic pistol. Interestingly, despite several murders predating his, Versace’s death is quite often cited as Australia’s first mafia murder due to its relevance to the Melbourne ‘ndrine. It does, however, qualify as one of the earliest Australian mob hits.
This murder can in a sense perhaps be used to colour the atmosphere of the 1957 meeting of the Society held in the Brunswick home of Versace’s brother. Granted, this was simply one of the apparent monthly gatherings held, that had happened to be detected. In any case, even before the time of his recorded involvement in the 1945 attack on Joe Versace, DeMarte was already under the scrutiny of the Victoria Police for his participation in a string of violent attacks. As would become a pattern, he would always end up acquitted of charges, especially considering that most victims refused to name or incriminate him in any way.
Described in a police report as “…sullen, morose, and violent…”, it was only natural that by the time of Italiano’s death, his violent and aggressive nature had seen DeMarte recognised as a player. Being close to the ‘right families’ would see him qualified as an acceptable candidate for leadership. The politics of underworld machinations, however, by their very nature exclude certain spheres. And so, if the speedy order of succession had any critics, it was one man who would make his displeasure plainly known.
Vincenzo Angilletta had migrated to Australia in 1951 with a criminal record in Italy that dated back to 1934, inclusive of arrests for black marketeering, carrying weapons and committing various assaults. He had been charged with aggravated assault in Italy in 1947, attending court in Catanzaro and receiving a supposed five-year sentence, which was only partly served. According to Cusack’s report, Angiletta was eventually discovered to have been an active member of an ‘ndrine in Calabria, where he and his three brothers had earned themselves a fearsome reputation. He is cited as having obtained a measure of wealth far discordant with his employment between his arrival and the mid 1960’s; therefore his prosperity was unaccountable.
The report continues by making mention of Angiletta having quickly found association with the local ‘ndrine basically on arrival, his reputation carrying him into affiliation with Italiano’s locale, supposedly acting in an enforcing capacity. Following the death of the man they called The Pope, described by Cusack as one time national boss, one theory holds that Angiletta began agitating to take the top spot. Continuing here with the Macera report, the doctor describes Muratore as deciding, eventually, to call a meeting of his peers.
Surveillance on par, the Victoria Police confirmed the meeting as having occurred at the Bonanza Bar, in Ascot Vale, Melbourne. The result of the meeting was the decision to murder Angiletta. Attended by the senior echelon of the DeMarte faction, the most likely attendees would include figures besides Muratore and DeMarte; such as Scriva, Benvenuto, and as was revealed in 2008, Rosario “Ross” Gangemi, dubbed “Ross the Boss” by a journalist for a sound-byte.
***Rosario Gangemi led a storied life. Born in rural Reggio Calabria in 1922 in abject poverty, he enlisted during the war and spent two years in a German concentration camp. Arriving in Australia in 1951, he endured forced transience when he was forced to return to Italy for the removal of a kidney. Returning in 1959, he would later be faced with the premature death of his first wife, as well as the tragic loss of a daughter. He faced all these trials while also maintaining a senior role in the Melbourne ‘ndrina for nearly half a century. In 1991, an ABCI report named him as one of the top ten leaders in Victoria. His 2008 funeral was the underworld event of the year, attended by no less than Mick Gatto.
Gangemi stands as a prime example of that which eludes us as the public. For decades, an individual can continually perpetrate his extortionate assaults upon a demographic that has the right to know better. Consider also, the case of Antonio Madafferi, the much maligned fruiterer who spent some litigious years trying to keep his name out of the media, only for his own brother to be arrested in a multi-million dollar drug bust. Or the tribulation of a successful businessman, afforded the status of civic respect, only to be publicly called out on the fact that you just so happen to belong to a particular club for Italian males, such as fruiterer Diego Luppino, and Giuseppe “Bebbe” Maraniti, who was also linked to the ’08 ecstasy bust by the Commonwealth, and revealed to have been positively identified as a leading figure in the Melbourne locale. In fact, it was posited in an article that these three men formed a “Trinity” that ruled atop the Melbourne ‘ndrine. This actually fits in with the structure pointed out as far back as John T. Cusack’s classic report; the coba-bastone, the contabile, and the counsellor. I’ll let you guess which is which while I get back to business.***
When Angiletta’s criminal record was noticed nearly two years after his entry to the Australia, there were murmurings towards a deportation order. However, by 1955 the Immigration Department had decided to let him stay in the country, with then Minster for Immigration Hubert Opperman releasing a statement. He was naturalised in 1961, his occupation listed as gardener/produce grower.
As a mid-level strong-arm style member of the Calabrian cell led by Italiano, who boasted a history dating back to the hillsides of Gioia Tauro, Angilletta commanded a level of respect somewhat beyond his apparent station. A succesful stall holder at the Queen Victoria Markets, he also worked as a grower from a small farm at his home. Seemingly comfortable in an arrangement with Italiano, he was summoned by DeMarte and company to what Cusack termed a “tribunal”, where Angiletta was disabused of his leadership opinions, and left on the floor with a stab wound, muttering threats.
It was only a short time before Angilletta would not only challenge the new hegemony, but go as far a forming his own faction to stand in rivalry to the locale that had chosen Demarte as their new leader. They became known amongst the Society as “La Bastarda”, or the Bastard Society, and dissatisfaction with the status quo was likely more widespread than DeMarte’s faction had anticipated, sources claiming it as containing nearly 300 members at its peak.
This faction would attract members across the state, with figures from families as far as Mildura throwing in their lot with Angilletta. This included men such as Nicola Correale and Pietro Medici, men linked with Society operations in Melbourne and interstate. There was the crew of young toughs, thoroughly loyal to Angiletta, which consisted of Francesco Angilletta, Angelo DeMarte, Francesco DeMasi and Carmelo Arfuso, who were chiefly responsible for spearheading the upcoming violence. Also, considering that DeMarte had over the years come into frequent conflicts with his unpredictable and violent nature, it was logical that there were seeds of resentment amongst a section of the Society (Consider the Tripodi brothers and the Osborn Street meeting).
Butting heads with those now being led by DeMarte, an openly defiant Angiletta is reported to have refused to heed orders from the leadership, striking out on his own with extortionate rackets and schemes, and declining to share his income with the rest of the cell. He reportedly also refused to sell his interests in a market venture to the figures designated by DeMarte, instead selling to a Greek family friends. In response to his defiance, he was continuously issued a string of beatings, culminating in a stabbing, and a likely hyperbolic claim that he was once humiliated by being smeared in animal excrement at the behest of the cell leaders. In turn though, Angilletta exhibited little reaction beyond continued defiance.
Angilletta scorned DeMarte’s authority quite publicly to the Society, a dangerous breach of protocol that would have left DeMarte with an ever shortening list of options for how to deal with Angilletta. Considering DeMarte’s likely tenuous grip on his only very recently assumed position amongst the Society, a popular member expressing such protests and noncompliance would likely have driven him into one of his rages.
Angilletta met his demise during the very early hours of April 4th 1963 when he arrived at the home he shared with his wife and seven children in Northcote, Melbourne. While parking in his driveway, he was murdered via two shotgun blasts through the rear car door windows; his wife Maria found him dead in the driver seat with the car still running. His eldest son, only fourteen years old at the time, admitted to police that before they had arrived on the scene he had gone and removed his father’s pistol from the car, later showing investigators where he had hidden it. The murder remains officially unsolved, despite full knowledge of the motives and circumstances surrounding.
Some seven months after his murder would mark when a few of the remaining members of the splinter-faction begun by Angiletta (which as mentioned, consisted of a number of his younger relations including his nephew Francesco Angilletta, his illegitimate son Carmelo Arfuso and his prospective son-in-law Angelo DeMarte, unrelated to Domenico) had attempted to murder Domenico DeMarte in retaliation.
Early on the morning of November 26 1963, Domenico DeMarte was blasted with a shotgun while leaving his Chapman Street home in North Melbourne for work at 4am. Seriously wounded by the shot to his back, DeMarte refused to cooperate with investigators at all. Footprints behind a neighbouring fence were discovered, but, as with Angilletta, for the time being no one was arrested for the attack. Effectively put out of action, DeMarte is then said to have retired from his short-lived position as boss of the Melbourne ‘ndrina. Hence, respected cell member Liborio Benvenuto took control of the leadership position and continued to run the market rackets.
Some remnants of the Angilletta faction continued to operate in defiance, next targeting Vincenzo Muratore, named in the Cusack report as the cell’s accountant or money man. A fixture at the markets for over twenty years, in some accounts Muratore is painted as a former ally of Angilletta; by the time of Angilletta’s death, however, he was firmly linked to the DeMarte/Benvenuto factions. He is reported to have purchased a .38 calibre pistol in the days following Angilletta’s murder.
At 2.30 am on January 16th 1964, Muratore was reversing down the driveway outside his Avondale Street home in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, on his way to the work. A shotgun blast from behind the car hit him first in the back; upon losing control of the car he was shot in the face, whereupon he died instantly. This murder, however, was not without its hiccups. A couple who were coming home late after their date had been sitting in their car close by, and were shocked to see a young man fling open their rear door and jump into the back seat.
Unaware that a murder had just been committed, the young couple stared in disbelief before ordering him out. After a few nervous seconds the man muttered something, and exited their car after another pulled up beside it, this time the actual getaway care. After the man had been driven away in it, the couple heard the wails of Muratore’s wife Filomena, and thus learned of the murder that had just taken place.
Approximately six months later police would charge Carmelo Arfuso with Muratore’s murder, after arresting him for driving with an unlicensed firearm in his car. The aforementioned couple, David Greig and Gillian Grace, would later pick the 21-year-old Arfuso out of a police line-up, citing him as closely resembling the man who had entered their car that night, though they stopped short of positively identifying him. During his subsequent trial for murder, records were produced showing Arfuso had purchased a shotgun a year before the murder, which he had then tried to return to the dealer in the months after. The proprietor of the gun shop, Kenneth Huddleston, testified that Arfuso had purchased SG shotgun cartridges after asking for advice on which ammunition would be most effective for killing large animals such as wild pigs and kangaroos. Police would then confirm in court that it had been SG cartridges that were found to have been used in the murder. Detectives from the Homicide Squad of the Victoria Police would also enter evidence that Arfuso had confessed to the murder in an unsigned statement to them, a charge Arfuso would strenuously deny.
Despite the strength of the supposed confession and a number of reports and investigators conclusively naming him as the attempted killer and killer of DeMarte and Muratore respectively, Arfuso was twice acquitted of all charges. Also cleared by investigators of involvement in both attacks was 23-year-old Angelo DeMarte. It was Angilletta’s nephew Francesco who particularly raised suspicion with his actions though; he had fled for Calabria within a month of the murder of Muratore. Subsequently arrested by the Carabinieri in Plati, he also was said to have confessed to the crimes, though he later claimed the supposed confession had been obtained under severe duress. Following a trial that lasted a year in Italy, Francesco Angilletta was also acquitted of both crimes. Therefore, no convictions were ever recorded in the death’s that came to be known to the public as the Market Murders.
Following his murder, Muratore’s family received a letter from unnamed persons. Lending credence to the claims made in the Brown, Macera, and Cusack reports of rampant racketeering in the Queen Victoria Markets, the letter admonished the family for Muratore’s crimes, purporting to be a response to his practises of extortion. As for Muratore himself, eventually he would be buried next to The Pope Italiano himself. The Muratore family name would continue to be a fixture amongst the Markets and the Society in decades to come.
The murder of Muratore seemingly sated any further desires for vengeance, in theory restoring honour to Angiletta’s family members. The next in line having ascended, the man who has been described as a “small, dapper gent”, was the popular commission agent Liborio Benvenuto. Presiding over the fractured cell, he ensured that operations were quickly restored to a tenuous peace. In August of 1964, a number of Calabrian men identified as Society leaders were observed by members of the Victorian police force meeting in bush land outside of Mildura. Later reports alleged that the meeting, which ran until 5am (having begun late the night before) had been called in part so Liborio Benvenuto could explain the recent tumult that had forced the spotlight onto the Society, and the following reasoning behind his rise.
Now firmly established as the most senior leader of the Melbourne ‘ndrina, decades would pass before the Society was again pushed out of their shadows, and the Benvenuto family would face their own internecine problems, with ramifications that affected several of the ‘ndrine around Victoria.
Mafia in Australia 