ITALIAN anti-Mafia officials are seeking to extradite and charge at least four Australians, including three Victorians, with conspiring with senior Calabrian Mafia figures to import one of Australia's largest cocaine shipments.
Documents obtained from a court in Catanzaro, Calabria, allege that the men conspired with Mafia figures between 2002 and early 2004 to ship up to 500 kilograms of cocaine from South America via Italy to Melbourne.
The requests follow an investigation co-ordinated by Italian authorities — codenamed Operation Decollo — which involved infiltrating a Calabrian Mafia drug-smuggling network operating across several continents.
The investigation has uncovered links between the Mafia network and terrorist groups in Colombia and Spain and led to arrest warrants for almost 100 people, including the four Australians.
A senior anti-Mafia commission prosecutor told The Age he began seeking the extradition of the Australians more than a year ago. "The trips that these men took to Italy were filmed, the telephone calls and conversations were intercepted, so we were able to supply the judge's office with evidence … that these people were involved in this international drug-trafficking of cocaine," prosecutor Salvatore Curcio said.
It is believed that the wanted men — Nicola Ciconte, 50, of Rowville, Michael Calleja, 48, of Kew, Vincenzo Medici, 40, of Mildura, and Carmelo Loprete, 38, of Adelaide — all live freely in Australia.
Ciconte finished an unrelated 12-month jail sentence last Friday for fraud and for failing to answer questions about drug trafficking before the Australian Crime Commission in 2004.
But despite an Italian judge issuing arrest warrants for the men more than two years ago and co-operation between the Australian Federal Police and Italian authorities, it is believed that the Italian Government is yet to send Australia the information required to initiate an extradition request.
Federal police conducted their own investigation into the four men, but it is believed the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions determined that the case was unlikely to succeed before a jury due to its complexity. It is believed the DPP also rejected an offer from Italy to send an undercover operative to testify in Australia.
An AFP spokeswoman said she could not comment on the details of the case and that extradition requests were a matter for the federal Attorney-General's Department. But she confirmed that federal police had not received an extradition request.
