The Australian Mafia: How One Calabrian Family Took Over a Continent – HT
July 15th, 1977, 6:15 in the evening, Griffith, New South Wales. A car park behind the Griffith Hotel on Bana Avenue. Donald Mai, 53 years old, furniture salesman, father of four, anti-drug crusader, walked toward his white Mitsubishi van with a carton of beer under his arm. He never made it. Three bullets from a 22 caliber pistol tore into his head and chest.
The shooter caught the brass shell casings as they ejected. Then he caught Mai too, dragged the body away and vanished into the wheat country like he’d never existed. By the time someone found the blood pooling beside the van. By the time the local sergeant radioed Sydney, by the time the country woke up to what had just happened, Donald Mai was gone forever. His body has never been found.
Not a bone, not a tooth, nothing. This wasn’t a robbery. This wasn’t personal. This was a message from an organization most Australians didn’t even know existed. They called themselves the Honored Society. The rest of the world calls them the Andranga. And on that winter evening in 1977 in a quiet farming town 600 km from Sydney, they killed an elected politician of the New South Wales Liberal Party in cold blood and got away with it.
This is the story of how one tiny mountain village in southern Italy transplanted itself into the wheat fields of rural Australia. How a handful of Calabrian peasants turned a continent into the world’s most profitable drug market. and how the most powerful mafia on earth hides in plain sight, growing tomatoes, running pizzeras, attending church on Sundays, while moving more cocaine than the Sicilians, the Neapolitans, and the Russians combined.
But here’s what the history books still don’t tell you. The Andrangetta didn’t just infiltrate Australia, they built it. They were there before the cities boomed. They were there before the cocaine wars. They voted. They donated to political parties. They shook hands with prime ministers. And they’re still there. To understand how a Calabrian crime family ended up controlling drug routes from Melbourne to Brisbane.
You have to go back not to the 70s, not even to the war. You have to go back to a place called Platy. A village in the Aspomante mountains of Calabria. the toe of the Italian boot, stone houses, goat tracks, poverty so thick it had a smell. Plotty had maybe 2,000 people in it at the start of the 20th century, and the unwritten law of the village was older than Italy itself.
Silence, honor, family, blood for blood. The dranga wasn’t like the Sicilian Kosanastra. There was no commission. There was no boss of bosses giving speeches. Then Drangetta was built on something stronger than hierarchy. It was built on DNA. Each clan, each andrina was a literal family. Fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, cousins marrying cousins to keep the bloodline tight.
You couldn’t infiltrate it. You couldn’t flip it. You were either born into it or you weren’t. When the famines hit Calabria in the 1890s and the early 1900s, the men of Plotty started leaving. Some went to America, some went to Argentina, and some, a small but determined group, boarded ships bound for the other side of the world, Australia.
They came as cane cutters. They came as laborers. They came with nothing but a name and a network. By the 1920s, they were settling in a town called Griffith in the Riverina region of New South Wales, where the soil was rich and the irrigation channels turned dust into gold. They grew grapes, they grew tomatoes, they grew oranges, they built churches, they opened cafes, they looked to their Anglo Australian neighbors like the perfect immigrant success story.
But under the surface, the old structures came with them. the blood oaths, the codes, the nandrine. By the 1930s, Australian police were already noticing something odd in the Italian quarter of Griffith. Murders that went unsolved. Witnesses who suddenly remembered nothing. Families that controlled entire markets without ever advertising.
They called it the black hand. They called it the society. They didn’t know what to call it because they didn’t yet know what it was. You have to understand something about Griffith. It wasn’t just a farming town. It was the perfect hiding place. Flat country, long horizons, hot summers and cold nights. Hours from the nearest big city.
The kind of place where everyone knew everyone. Where strangers stuck out. Where the local cop drank with the local farmer because there was nobody else to drink with. If you wanted to grow something illegal in Australia in the 1960s, Griffith was paradise. And what they grew was marijuana. By the early 70s, the Calabrian families of Griffith had figured out the math.
A hectare of grapes might earn a farmer $10,000 in a good year. A hectare of marijuana hidden between rows of corn or tucked into a remote paddic could earn 80,000, maybe a h 100,000. The Australian appetite for cannabis was exploding. The police didn’t know what they were looking at. And the Calabrians had something nobody else had. They had the families.
They had the discipline. They had the silence. The operation worked like this. The patriarchs in Griffith, men with names like Sergy and Trimbley and Barbaro, would identify trusted soldiers, almost always blood relatives, almost always from the same handful of villages back in Calabria. Those soldiers would lease farmland through cutouts, Anglo names on the paperwork, cash transactions where possible.
The plants would go in around October when the weather turned. They’d be harvested in March or April. The crop would be trucked to Sydney and Melbourne in modified vans, sold through a network of pizzeras and fruit shops that doubled as distribution points, and the money would flow back to Griffith in suitcases.
Nobody snitched. Nobody could. Everyone involved was related to everyone else. The Calabrians called this network Laamelia, the family. By 1975, conservative estimates suggested they were producing marijuana with a street value of over $50 million a year. Some investigators put it higher, much higher.
And then a furniture salesman started asking questions. Donald Mai was not a cup. He wasn’t a journalist. He wasn’t a federal agent. He was a local businessman, a church-going father, a man who’d run for the New South Wales State Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate and lost. He sold lounge suites and dining tables out of a shop on Bana Avenue.
But Mai had two qualities that made him deadly. He was incorruptible and he was furious. In 1975, Mai started feeding tips to the New South Wales drug squad. He told them where the plantations were. He told them which families were involved. In November of that year, his information led to a raid at Kambbley, about an hour south of Griffith, where police seized cannabis plants worth roughly $80 million in 1975 money.
It was the biggest drug bust in Australian history. Three men were arrested, all of them Calabrian, all of them connected to the Trimboy Andrina. You have to understand what this meant inside the honored society. It wasn’t just a financial loss. It was a humiliation. A [clears throat] grosser’s son from Platy, a man named Robert Trimblely, was running the marijuana operation.
They called him Aussie Bob. He had a soft voice, a quick smile, and a temper that went off like a flashbulb. Trembly convened the bosses, the Sergy brothers, Antonio Barbaro. the old men who’d come over on the boats decades earlier. The decision was made in a back room of a Griffith Social Club.
Mai had to go, not warned, not threatened, killed, as an example. The contract was placed with a Melbourne hitman named James Frederick Basley. He was a known killer, a freelancer, a man who’d worked for both the Calabrians and the Painters and Dockers Union enforcers. The price was $10,000, half upfront, half on completion.
A bargain even in 1977 for the assassination of an elected official. On the afternoon of July 15th, Basley positioned himself in the Griffith Hotel car park. He waited for hours. He drank coffee. He chains smoked. When Mai walked out of the hotel at 6:15 carrying that carton of beer for a regional party meeting, Basley stepped out from behind the van.
Three shots, quick, professional. The shells caught in his palm. The body dragged into a waiting vehicle. The drive into the wheat country, the grave that has never been found. The next morning, Mai’s wife, Barbara, reported him missing. Police found the van. They found the blood. They found three 22 caliber shell casings that Basley had missed.
And they found nothing else. No body, no witness, no motive that anyone in Griffith would discuss out loud. But the killing of Donald Mai didn’t bury the story. It detonated it. The Australian government, under pressure from a furious public, convened the Woodward Royal Commission into drug trafficking in 1977.
Justice Philip Woodward spent two years digging into Griffith. He named names. He drew organizational charts. He revealed the existence of an Italian organized crime structure that the Australian federal police had quietly been tracking but had never been able to penetrate. The Woodward Report published in 1979 was the first official Australian document to use the word Andranghetta.
It described a Calabrian criminal society with members in every Australian capital city. It estimated the network’s annual marijuana revenue at well over $und00 million. And it named Robert Trimbley as the man who ordered Mai’s death. But naming Trembbley wasn’t the same as catching him. By the time the report came out, Aussie Bob had already disappeared.
He fled Australia in 1981, bouncing between Ireland, France, and Spain on false passports. Australian authorities chased him for nearly a decade. They never got him. Trimbley died of a heart attack in Madrid in May of 1987. 60 years old, a fugitive to the end. The man who ordered the assassination of a state political candidate slipped through the net.
Basisley, the triggerman, was eventually convicted in 1986, not for Mikai’s murder, but for a separate drugrelated double homicide. He spent the rest of his life in prison and died there in 2007, never confirming, never denying. Here’s what most people don’t understand about the Mai case. The Andrangetta didn’t lose. Yes, they lost a crop.
Yes, they lost public sympathy. But they sent the message they wanted to send. For the next three decades, no Australian politician, no journalist, no local activist would ever again publicly take on the Calabrian families of Griffith with the same intensity Donald Mai had. The lesson stuck.
And while the country was looking at marijuana, the honored society was already pivoting to something bigger, cocaine. By the 1990s, the global drug economy was changing. Marijuana was being decriminalized across parts of the Western world. Profits were flattening. But cocaine, pure Colombian cocaine, moving out of Cali and Medigene, was exploding in price and demand.
The Nadrangata in Calabria had spent the 80s building direct relationships with Colombian producers. They had the ports. They had Joya Taro on the southern Italian coast, one of the largest container shipping hubs in the Mediterranean. And they had a global diaspora that included the most underestimated outpost of all, Australia.
The setup was beautiful in its simplicity. Colombian cocaine would be loaded into shipping containers, often hidden inside legitimate cargo like coffee beans, bananas, or industrial machinery. The containers would transit through European ports controlled by andetta affiliated logistics companies. Then they’d be rehipped to Australia, arriving at the ports of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.
On the Australian end, the same Calabrian family network that had moved marijuana for 30 years now moved cocaine. The pizzeras, the fruit shops, the construction companies, the same surnames, the same villages, the same blood oaths. And the math by this point was unbelievable. A kilogram of cocaine that cost $1,500 to produce in Colombia could be sold wholesale in Australia for $240,000 Australian dollars.
240,000 for 1 kilo. By the early 2000s, Australia had the most expensive cocaine market on Earth, and the Calabrians owned it. The biggest seizure came on June 28th, 2007. A shipping container arrived in Melbourne. Inside, hidden in tins of crushed Italian tomatoes, were 4.4 metric tons of MDMA ecstasy and 150 kg of cocaine, street value, 440 million Australian dollars.
It was at the time the largest ecstasy seizure in world history. The investigation, code named Operation Inca, ran for years. It led directly to a man named Pasquali Barbaro, a Griffithborn Australian whose father had been a senior figure in the honored society for decades. Pasquali Barbaro was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-p parole period of 30 years.
But here’s the part the headlines missed. Operation Inca didn’t dismantle the Nandranga in Australia. It barely scratched it. For every Pasquali Barbaro who went down, there were five cousins who stepped up. The structure absorbed the loss. The families regrouped. The shipments kept coming. In 2008, in a small town in Germany called Doober, six men were gunned down outside an Italian restaurant in what became known as the Ferraosto massacre.
All six were in Drang Heta. The killings were the spillover of a feud between two Calabrian clans. the Pelle Votari and the Nerta Strangio. The story made global headlines. Suddenly, European police, Italian magistrates, and international observers started talking about the Andrangetta in a new way. They weren’t just a regional Italian problem.
They were a transnational organization. And in 2013, an Italian anti-mafia investigator named Nicola Gretie said something that should have terrified Australia. than Drangetta Gretie said controls roughly 80% of the cocaine entering Europe and they have a stronger presence in Australia than anywhere else in the world outside Italy. 80%.
Read that again. Of all the cocaine moving through Europe, 8 out of 10 kilos were touched, transported, or financed by Calabrian families with direct blood ties to Australia. The Australian Crime Commission in a 2015 report finally said publicly what investigators had whispered for 40 years. Then Drunketta had infiltrated Australian politics.
They had infiltrated Australian business. They had infiltrated Australian agriculture. They had relationships with serving members of parliament. They had laundered hundreds of millions of dollars through legitimate companies. and they had done it all while the Australian public continued to believe the country didn’t really have a mafia problem.
By 2020, the picture had darkened further. Operation Ironside, a joint sting between the Australian Federal Police and the FBI, intercepted millions of encrypted messages on a customuilt phone platform called Anom that organized crime figures believed was secure. It wasn’t. The FBI was reading every message.
When the operation went public in June 2021, more than 200 Australians were arrested. A significant portion were Andrangetta affiliated. The messages revealed everything. Cocaine shipments, murder plots, bribed officials, family members coordinating with cousins in Calabria, in Toronto, in New York. the same network, the same names, the same villages.
And still, the honored society continued. Because here’s the truth about the Endrangetta that nobody in Australia wants to admit. You cannot arrest your way out of a blood network. You can take down a crew. You can seize a shipment. You can imprison a boss. But you cannot break a structure where every member is the cousin or the nephew or the son-in-law of every other member.
The Drunk Hetta isn’t an organization. It’s [clears throat] a tribe. And you don’t dismantle a tribe with handcuffs. What happened to the people from this story? Donald McCay’s body has still never been found. His family campaigned for decades. They erected a memorial in Griffith. They demanded answers that never came.
[snorts] James Basley died in prison in 2007, taking what he knew with him. Robert Trembley died a free man on Spanish soil. The Sergy clan, the Barbaro clan, the Tremboli clan, all of them are still operating in Griffith today. Some of the men identified in the Woodward Royal Commission of 1979 are still alive, still in their homes on Bana Avenue and the surrounding country roads, still controlling vineyards and trucking companies and building firms.
The drunk heta in Australia today is wealthier, more sophisticated, and more integrated than it has ever been. Australian police estimate the organization moves billions of dollars in cocaine and methamphetamine annually. It launderers that money through real estate in Sydney, Melbourne, and on the Gold Coast.
It owns construction firms that bid on public infrastructure projects. It funds political donations through legitimate front companies. It is woven so deep into the fabric of Australian commerce that pulling it out would tear the cloth. What this story reveals is something simple and brutal. Organized crime, real organized crime, doesn’t look like a movie.
It doesn’t wear pinstriped suits. It doesn’t stage driveby shootings on city streets. It looks like a quiet farmer in a wheat town. It [clears throat] looks like a grandfather grilling sausages at a christening. It looks like a businessman donating to the local hospital. The Honored Society survived a 100red years of war, exile, prosecution, and exposure.
Not because it was violent, but because it was patient. It planted itself generation by generation in the soil of a new country, and it grew like the marijuana it once smuggled. Slow, hidden, profitable, permanent. Donald Mai died because he believed one man could matter. He was right and he was wrong. He mattered enough to be murdered.
He didn’t matter enough to win. 47 years after his death, his killers are dead. His family has buried their grief. And the families he tried to expose are richer than they have ever been. That’s the real legacy of the Australian Andrangetta. Not the body count, not the seizures, the endurance, the way blood in the end always beats the badge.
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