Drug kingpin gets life for ecstasy import

The leader of a drug ring which conspired to traffic 15 million ecstasy tablets brought into Australia in tomato tins has been jailed for life.

Pasquale Barbaro, 50, was sentenced to a minimum 30 years’ jail after pleading guilty to three charges relating to three separate operations of trafficking and attempting to possess massive quantities of MDMA and cocaine.

His righthand man, Saverio Zirilli, 55, pleaded guilty to the same three charges and was jailed for 26 years, with a minimum of 18 years, by Justice Betty King in the Victorian Supreme Court in February.

Details of the proceedings were suppressed from publication until now because other men involved in the drug ring were facing a separate trial before Justice King.

Those four men, John Higgs, 65, Salvatore Agresta, 44 and two who cannot be named, were found guilty on Thursday of their involvement in what was, at the time, the world’s biggest ecstasy seizure.

It still remains the largest amount of ecstasy ever seized in Australia.

After 13 days of deliberations following the trial that began in February, the jury found the men guilty on one count each of intending to possess a commercial quantity of an unlawfully imported substance, namely MDMA.

The tablets were imported from Naples in Italy in a 6.1-metre container aboard a ship which arrived on the Melbourne docks on June 28, 2007.

The trial heard Customs officers examining the container found a wall of 3kg tomato cans – 15 rows high and 14 cans across – some containing rocks and gravel while others contained pills.

The net weight of the 15 million tablets was 4.4 tonnes, with testing of the tablets removed from the cans revealing that the pure MDMA component of those tablets was more than 1.4 tonnes, the trial heard.

But on the container’s arrival, no one came forward to claim it.

Listening device and telephone intercepts revealed the men became increasingly concerned about how they would obtain the drugs.

Barbaro and Zirilli pleaded guilty to their involvement in three separate hauls, including conspiring to traffic the MDMA concealed in tomato tins in 2007.

They were also behind the trafficking in 2008 of 1.2 million ecstasy tablets and that same year attempted to possess almost 100kg of pure cocaine, imported in a container of coffee beans from Colombia.

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