Barbaro's brood stands at 8

By GREG ANSLEY, Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - Joe Barbaro has had more than just the natural agonies of a father to suffer following the kidnapping of his 3-month-old daughter, Montana, in a Melbourne shopping centre a week ago.

Since his picture first flashed across Australia in an appeal for the kidnappers to return his baby, Barbaro's tangled private life has become increasingly public, revealing a total so far of eight children to four women.

Other revelations have been terrifying for Cheryl and Mark McEachran, the couple accused of bashing and pepper-spraying Montana's mother, Anita Ciancio, grabbing the baby, and later abandoning her in a derelict Melbourne house.

Barbaro has now emerged as a convicted drug trafficker, whose family have for decades been tied to organised crime and violence in Australia, including connections to the late Robert Trimbole, once one of the nation's most notorious gangsters.

The family, including Joe Barbaro, were at one stage suspects in the 1989 killing of Assistant Federal Police Commissioner Colin Winchester and were allegedly part of the N'dranghita - or Honoured Society - a crime syndicate originating in Calabria, Italy.

Although a disaffected public servant, David Eastman, was convicted of Winchester's murder, the investigation uncovered large cannabis plantations allegedly cultivated by the family outside Canberra and led to Barbaro's jailing for five years on heroin trafficking charges.

As the tangled threads of Barbaro's complex life continued to unravel, the Melbourne Herald-Sun reported that last week's revelations of a secret second family in Canberra were only a part of the story.

Barbaro lives in Melbourne with Ciancio, also the mother of Sienna, 19 months, but has two other children, Letesha, 6, and Jay, 3, by a former fiancee, Tanya Flynn, a Canberra woman who last week claimed not to have known about Ciancio and to have still been engaged to Barbaro.

But at the weekend, after Barbaro told the Herald-Sun that not only had Flynn known about Ciancio but that Ciancio had minded Letesha and Jay, Flynn admitted the relationship had ended two years ago.

While clarifying this relationship, Barbaro said he had three other sons, aged 12, 15 and 17, to a woman in Queensland.

Another son, Pasquale, 23, is facing charges of amphetamine trafficking that also involve Barbaro's brother, Frank. Pasquale has further charges pending in Canberra over the robbery of a security guard.

Barbaro told the Herald-Sun that he kept in touch with all his children and that, despite all, Anita Ciancio would stand by him.

Ciancio's devotion will be tested again in November, when Barbaro appears in court charged with trafficking in a drug of dependence and cultivating and possessing cannabis.

Barbaro was arrested in March during a series of raids in Melbourne that also led to the charging of expatriate Auckland-born singer Allison Durbin with trafficking, possessing and cultivating cannabis and theft of electricity, and to the arrests of two other men.

This is just business for a family that arrived from Calabria in 1957. Three uncles - Tony, Frank and Rocco - were identified as key figures in the vast cannabis plantations around Griffith in New South Wales that were tied to Trimbole during the royal commission that followed the 1977 murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay.

Tony and Rocco were later charged with large-scale cannabis cultivation near Canberra following an investigation led by Winchester, but were dismissed.

Barbaro's father, Pasquale snr, was also allegedly - but never proven to be - involved in cannabis production, and to have been a senior member of N'dranghita, an organisation federal investigators said was heavily involved in narcotics importation and distribution, money laundering, extortion and other crimes.

Pasquale snr was shot dead in Brisbane in 1990, either, the Canberra Times said, because he had turned informer or because he had left Barbaro's Italian mother, Ann, for a Filipino woman.

Rocco Barbaro lost a leg in 1993 in what he said was a shotgun accident but which police suspect was a deliberate shooting; two years ago Tony was found shot dead after being released from a jail sentence for drug crimes; and last year a cousin, Pasquale "Little Pat" Barbaro, was murdered in a car with Melbourne gangster Jason Moran.