Mr Asia syndicate had Vanessa Devlin killed after her arrest and impending court trial?
Mr Peters explained to me in 2003 why the dogs were set on him. "A surveillance officer gave me information that there were planes from Asia flying under the radar to a remote airfield and three or four hours later they would fly back out in the same direction. They flew them in that low that they couldnt be detected even by the jumbo jets flying from Asia,
https://www.finnmurder.com/breaking-the-code.html
A former senior officer was linked the infamous Mr Asia drug syndicate
https://www.finnmurder.com/breaking-the-code.html
Zanzibar nightclub.
https://thewest.com.au/news/australia/gambling-and-heroin-pave-road-to-riches-ng-ya-210872
Extracts>
Gambling and heroin pave road to riches
GARY ADSHEAD and SEAN COWAN | The West Australian
Thursday, 27 May 2010 12:32PM
Pictured: Club owner Carl Rispoli of Godfathers night club
It's 1938 and Italian migrant Giuseppe Rocco Rispoli is eyeballing a Northbridge building as a possible illegal gambling club.
The location is perfect but there's a problem. The bank which owns it told the dapper 27-year-old from Calabria he can rent 155 James Street on one condition: he must open a food store rather than a club. The last tenant tried to run a gambling den until police raided it so often it was forced to close. The bank didnt want history repeating.
"It was a good spot for my club, though," Rispoli wrote in his memoirs before his death in 2005, "so I went to see if a friend of mine could help me."
Arthur Gallagher was a good friend to have. He was a WA police officer who had known Rispoli since their days in Wiluna, where one was the town barber and the other was the local cop.
"I talked to Arthur about the premises in James Street that I wanted to run as a club," Rispoli wrote. "Arthur was a great friend of mine so he told me hed see what he could do."
The Rispoli memoirs, revealed in*The West Australian*for the first time, say the police officer visited the bank's manager.
"Arthur then came and saw me and told me to go and see Mr Clark (the bank manager) again," Rispoli wrote. "When I next see Mr Clark he said: 'Come in Mr Rispoli. Youve got a good friend. The keys are here, you can do what you like'."
The Rispolis' infamous Roma Club was born and so, it could be argued, was Perth's underbelly.
Only World War II and the internment of migrants such as Rispoli, a member of the pro-Mussolini fascist Black Shirts, put a hold on the spread of Perth's colourful illegal gambling venues. Once the war ended, it was business as usual and by the time the swinging 60s came along, Rispoli was entrenched in his second club.
He and his brother Vince, a partner in Roma, had fallen out and Rispoli found a new James Street location to start Il Trovatore, one of a handful of clubs in Northbridge before Burswood Casino stole the market. Others were the International Club, Club 27, the Latin Quarter and the Patris Club.
Another memorable character from those lively days was Rocco "Ginger" Antonetti, the boss of Ginger's in William Street for 20 years after migrating to Australia in 1952 from Fondi, a town half way between Rome and Naples. But it was Il Trovatore which drew the biggest crowds and the most attention from police.
"I had gambling in the club but, of course, that was illegal," Rispoli recalled. "The police would raid the club. It was something that would happen regularly and it was just part of doing business.
"I had connections in the police force who would let me know about an upcoming raid on our club so we could make sure we were seen to be doing the right thing on that night."
Nowhere in his memoirs does Rispoli discuss what the police wanted for tipping off the illegal club bosses, but he gives more than a hint that money changed hands.
"I never resented the inconvenience of the raids or the arrangements with the police," he wrote. "It was a good arrangement. If they arrested us, we'd go to court and the magistrate would fine us 20 or 50 pounds, sometimes 100 pounds.
"But we were mostly protected by the police."
Stepping up from illegal gambling, by the mid-1940s, organised crime in WA had graduated to murder. Visiting Sydney standover man George "The Midnight Raider" Wallace was stabbed in a toilet outside Perths European Club. He died two weeks later after refusing to name his killer or the motive for the attack.
But unlike the waves of organised crime violence in the Eastern States, Perth's underbelly has only had the occasional murder, usually from turf wars, personality clashes or disputes over money. Much more common were bashings, stabbings and intimidation, especially by the local gangs who ran prostitution rackets and collected their take from the poor Northbridge shop owners.
Rispoli, meanwhile, never considered himself a criminal for simply running a gambling club.
He said in his memoirs he had always resisted Perth's "mafia", which was also referred to as the Black Hand. Of Sicilian origin, the mafia was rumoured to have been established in WA as early as 1922. The Calabrian crime organisation LOnorata, or Honoured Society, came later.
In 1956, the murder of Archangelo Macri near Russell Square in Northbridge had mafia overtones. He was stabbed with a long, double-edged blade by Salvatore Stillitano and screamed "Mama mia, he has killed me" as he fell to the bitumen. Their feud stretched back to the old country and the Italians of Northbridge kept their mouths shut while police investigated. The southern Italian code of silence, or "omerta", still applied in Australia.
Even Rispoli could not avoid the local mafia altogether. Once he intervened to help a doctor friend who was being stood over. He showed one of his patrons, tough guy Mick Pellegrini, an extortion note from the Black Hand. Pellegrini then went to the mafia boss, who agreed to leave the doctor alone.
"The boss told Mick that he could tell the doctor to sleep with two pillows from now on an Italian saying that means he can sleep easy," Rispoli said in his memoirs.
Even if the mafia was frozen out of Il Trovatore officially, unofficially many criminal connections were made inside the cabaret lounge. Some would go down in history.
Before Rispoli cut his ties to the club in January 1983, there was another fracture in his family and this time another iconic Northbridge name was embroiled in the trouble.
The Tudori brothers, Bert and Laurie, who had run the Zanzibar in Northbridge since the 1960s, became partners in Il Trovatore in the 1970s despite Joe Rispoli claiming in his memoirs that he was unhappy about the arrangement. Vince Rispoli had married a Tudori and so they had become family.
"I didnt trust them and I dont think Vince trusted them either, but he didn't want to admit it because they were his wifes brothers," Rispoli wrote. "Things were not good after that. My son Ricki was in charge one night and he told me that $2000 was missing from the takings and that hed seen one of the brothers-in-law take it."
Rispoli did not say whether it was Bert Tudori, the brother who became Perths deputy lord mayor.
In the end, plans to license a casino at Burswood in the early 1980s made Joe Rispoli's decision to pull out of Il Trovatore easy.
The memoirs say that the then police commissioner told Rispoli his club's days were over. By that stage, the relationship between Joe and Vince was toxic and the bad blood continued until the day Vince died in 1996.
"Ive never been able to forgive Vince for the trouble he caused me," Rispoli said. "He passed away and I never even went to his funeral."
But the Rispoli name remained strong in Perth's entertainment scene for years to come. Joe's son Carlo continued to run Il Trovatore and opened his own Subiaco nightclub, The Godfather.
The death of illegal gambling in Northbridge ended an era for underworld punters, who lost more money than theyd care to admit. One was the Sicilian-born drug dealer Paul Musarri, who used the clubs for business and pleasure.
While winning, losing and laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars of his ill-gotten gains across the tables at Il Trovatore and Gingers, Musarri was always thinking up criminal enterprises.
Heroin was crowned king back in the late 1970s and Musarri could always find pawns to smuggle a package from Asia's Golden Triangle to the streets of Perth.
He wasnt the only one. The Asian heroin connection was strong and Perth was a major landing point for the drug from the late 1970s.
Drug barons with links from Christmas Island to Amsterdam pioneered a route overland from WA to Sydney.
Smugglers who crewed Chinese ships into Fremantle would simply walk the drugs off the dock. From there, the "commodity" would be sent to Sydney and then sold to dealers across Australia. Some heroin came back to Perth.
One of the first men caught over a Perth heroin importation was Christmas Islander Kok Juan "Ray" Foo, who was jailed for 10 years in 1978 for possession with intent to sell or supply. Foo later became a senior member of the Chinese/ Singapore-run Sing Ma triad and was jailed again in 2001, this time for 17 years. A National Crime Authority operation codenamed Cha Cha seized $6 million of heroin and $740,000 cash from triad members in Australia.
But Foo wasnt the senior Sing Ma member in Perth at the time. That was Alex Chan, aka Victor Chan, who was born in China, raised in Singapore and schooled in Hong Kong. Now 59, the father of four was a mad gambler and referred to by at least one Sing Ma member as "Dai Lo", meaning Big Brother.
Before being jailed for 20 years in 2000 as the kingpin behind a 3.4kg heroin importation from Thailand to Sydney, Chan part-owned a Perth market garden which exported vegetables to Asia, a Kuala Lumpur construction company and a Sydney firm that exported wine to China.
In sentencing Chan, the judge said he was "a man of strong personality who used others to carry out his bidding. Without any apparent source of legitimate income, he led a lavish lifestyle which included substantial gambling activities".
Another intriguing event for police tracking Asian organised crime links to Australia occurred in dramatic style on the Nullarbor in 1996 when NSW kitchenhand Mok Ka Kui was nabbed with $258,000 on a bus from Perth to Sydney. The day before, investigators watched him meet three members of the so-called John Kizon group. Kui was deported to Hong Kong after being acquitted on separate heroin possession charges because he had been living in Australia illegally.
The links between Sing Ma and Perth's criminal networks are still strong. Many of Perths crime gangs import drugs themselves, but just as many rely on Sing Ma for supplies.
In the 1980s, Musarri also relied on Asian-based suppliers for his deals, including the one which gave him notoriety and became known as the Barlow and Chambers affair.
Musarri was aged just two when he arrived with his parents and four siblings from Sicily, home of the Mafia. He gave up on education at 14 when expelled from yet another school. He learnt to box and, more importantly, that crime did pay.
He also developed a gambling addiction and in the 1970s, to feed this habit, he set up his OConnor smash repair shop to process stolen cars to send east. He kept his ill-gotten gains in his mattress because he hated banks and, for a time, the car racket satisfied him until he decided the really big money was in "smack".
By the early 1980s, Musarri was in a group of about a dozen men responsible for most of Perths street heroin trade. Many were linked back to the old gambling parlours, such as Victor Karapetcos, who once operated the Russian poker game at Il Trovatore and was jailed after being caught with half a kilo of heroin at a house owned by professional gambler Michael "Blondie" Onuszkanycz.
Blondie later ended up in jail over a separate deal linked to professional gambler Ralph Romeo, though Romeo was acquitted on appeal.
But police eventually got their man. Romeo was acquitted of drugs offences with members of the Combi family, who police alleged wanted money to buy a brothel, but was later convicted with former gambling club operator Anthony "Cannon" Ricciardello. Co-accused Ivan Jack Marinovich was acquitted on appeal.
As will be revealed in*The West Australian*tomorrow, the tentacles spread further to names still synonymous with the WA underworld.
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