Humble servant of the Nation

A Rocco road to deportation

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Rocco Arico has just commenced a 14 year jail sentence. Arico, a member of the Calabrian mafia, ‘Ndrangheta, and a person of note in Melbourne’s bloody gangland wars, has more than his jail sentence to worry about.

Arico, 38, known as ‘Rocky’ to his friends and criminal associates, came to Australia with his parents as a young child. He married here and has children but he is a resident, not an Australian citizen. When his jail term ends, Arico will almost certainly be bundled off to Tullamarine Airport and put on a plane back to Italy, deported on character grounds.

Late last year Arico was convicted of extortion, intentionally causing injury and trafficking methamphetamine and cocaine. Details of his conviction were suppressed by the courts while he faced firearms and further drug charges.

Arico first came to my attention when I was making a documentary on the life of one of his associates, Dino Dibra. Dibra was a member of the Sunshine Boys, a gang of young villains most of whom became casualties in Melbourne’s underworld bullet fest. Founding members Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin, Paul Kalipolitis and Mark Mallia are all dead. Dibra was slain in a hail of bullets outside one of his safe houses in Sunshine in Melbourne’s west in October 2000. One of the two shooters was Veniamin.

Full column here.

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