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Coffee with a mafioso: The time I met John Latorre

16 1
12.03.2024

When I asked John Latorre whether he knew anything about the existence of the Calabrian mafia in Australia— an organisation I’d been told by police he almost certainly belonged to – he scoffed.

There was no so-called Honoured Society with participants bound by family, ethnicity, tradition and organised, sometimes very violent, crime.

John Latorre, seen here at an underworld funeral in 2015, was executed outside his Greenvale home.Credit: Jason South

Sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Melbourne, Latorre told me that I’d confused a police conspiracy with a close-knit pocket of the Calabrian community whose members did little more than look out for one another.

Making his case, the bald, thickset middle-aged man vacillated between being polite and mildly menacing.

When I politely pondered aloud as to how his explanation tallied with the execution-style killings of several figures linked to this same small, but influential enclave within Victoria’s largely law-abiding Australian-Calabrian community, Latorre stayed dismissive.

Vince Latorre (right) and his lawyer Peter Ward outside court in 2006.Credit: John Woudstra

His position remained unchanged when I prodded him about the 1991 murder of Shepparton man Rocco Iaria.

Latorre’s brother Vince was named by a coroner as a suspect in that crime, which was one of several unsolved homicides linked to the same secretive society John Latorre insisted did not exist.

At the mention of Iaria, Latorre’s coffee companion, who, like John, was a reputed senior member of the ’Ndrangheta, interrupted.

“Rocco went for a walk and didn’t come back,” he said coolly.

Perhaps noting the surprise register on my face, this man then followed up with what he considered to be a joke. “Don’t worry,” he said. “No journalists have ever disappeared ... yet.”

Latorre responded to this by shutting down our discussion.

“We are........

© The Age


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