‘Mafia hit man’ exposed by cops
AN assassin who was suspected of the execution murder of Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Colin Winchester 30 years ago has been allegedly identified after a secret police review into Italian mafia operations in Australia.
Winchester was murdered with two shots to the back of his head outside his Canberra home in January 1989 in a crime that shocked the nation and led to the most exhaustive investigation in Australian criminal history.
Despite Italian police intelligence later revealing two assassins dubbed “The Shepherds” had been dispatched to Australia in October 1988 to carry out a murder, Canberra public servant David Eastman was instead charged with the slaying before later being cleared.
News Corp Australia can reveal one of the “Shepherds” is a man living in suburbia with his Australian wife. The Shepherd, who Italian police told the AFP back in 1990 was to carry out the murder then arranged to be married to a local mafia boss’s daughter to stay in the country, was this week found and spoken to by News Corp Australia.
The man, in his sandals and socks, admitted to being spoken to by police at the time of Winchester’s murder but denied having any involvement.
He said he was visiting family at the time of the murder. And as for links with Italian drug bosses, it was a coincidence since they all hailed from the same villages in Calabria, Italy. “This is not me, the police are knocking on the wrong wall,” he said.
The second man identified as one of the two Shepherds left the country shortly after the slaying.
Eastman would spend 19 years in jail before an independent inquiry found a miscarriage of justice and ordered a retrial in which he was found innocent and given $7 million in compensation. Now a broad AFP inquiry into the Italian ’Ndrangheta mafia in Australia, first announced 2018, has reopened previously closed files into the Winchester assassination. That review is understood to have unearthed new information relating to The Shepherds, including underworld connections not previously established.
That information points to a broader Italian criminal milieu featuring some of the biggest names in Italian drug crime in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. It specifically links the two Shepherds to drug plots and figures involved in cannabis plantations that Winchester and the AFP were allowing to be cultivated at the time of his murder in a bid to gather intelligence on the Mr Bigs of the Italian underworld.
Former ACT attorney-general and lawyer involved in the Eastman case Bernard Collaery welcomed the AFP’s review of the “other hypothesis” of it having been a mafia hit.
“Since when does the killing of an assistant police commissioner fizzle out like this? I mean, this is not just a murder; if it is determined to be an assassination of the highest level then it strikes at democracy,” Mr Collaery said.
Despite the review into Italian organised crime being a federal AFP investigation, the AFP headquarters has declined to comment, instead declaring it an ACT policing matter. “As this is a matter for ACT Police we will have to refer you to them,” a spokesman said on Friday.
Since the AFP’s original murder investigation, The Shepherd has also been convicted over a large-scale drug plot with other leading Italian crime figures.
Within hours of the 1995 guilty Eastman judgment, then AFP commissioner Mick Palmer described the case as a test of the AFP’s professionalism, which he said was “exceptional”. It would be several years later before an independent inquiry branded it “deeply flawed”. That led to a retrial that in November 2018 concluded Eastman was not guilty of murder. Even after this verdict, the AFP has consistently dismissed suggestions its case was ever tainted or that any other suspect was ever in the frame.