By: Paul Whitittaker & Rory Callinan
DEAD rock star Michael Hutchence had property dealings with a company with alleged mafia connections, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found. An alleged high ranking member of the L'Onorata Societa or Calabrian mafia and his family are current and former directors of a company which sold a
Gold Coast bowling alley for $2.25 million to a trustee company linked to the former INXS frontman.
National Crime Authority investigators raided the Labrador bowling alley in January, 1995 as part of a major cocaine trafficking investigation codenamed Operation Pug. Company records indicate Harbrick Pty Ltd, who former directors include convicted drug boss Bruno "The Fox" Romeo, also borrowed $270,000 as part of the 1994 land deal.
A top secret police intelligence report alleged Romeo was a key member of Italian organised crime groupd in Australia. The curiousily named Nexcess owns the title to the bowling alley on behalf of a trust.
Nexcess is part of a tangled web of eight companies - six of them based offshore - being sued by Hutchence's mother and stepsister in a bid to force them to declare they hold an estimated $25 million in missing assets
hidden from the dead singer's will. The $270,000 loan to Harbrick - which Australian Securities and Investment
Commission records show has not been discharged - was secured against bowling equipment and other fixtures at the Paradise Lanes Complex at the Southport Broadwater. The bowling alley at 378 Marine Parade, Labrador, is one of five multi million dollar properties worldwide which Hutchence's mother Patricia Glassop and stepsister Tina Hutchence claim should have been included in the millionaire singer's estate and divided according to his will. The NCA's Operation Pug targeted a person associated with Harbrick, which continued to run the bowling complex after selling the land it was on to Nexcess.
The operation resulted in a former South Australian man - who was not an office holder of Harbrick - being convicted of cocaine trafficking. Hutchence suicided in a Sydney hotel suite in November, 1997. Bruno Romeo snr, 69, who was jailed for 10 years in 1994 over his role as the ringleader of an $8 million cannabis growing operation on remote pastoral leases in Western Australia, was a director of his family company Harbrick from 1988 to 1990.
His son, Bruno Lee Romeo, 42 who was jailed for eight and a half years in Western Australia in 1987 for conspiring to cultivate a 1.5ha cannabis crop, is still a director of the Queensland registered firm.