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- [00:01]
Nino Bucci
Are you able to confirm about Stockholm father and son? I believe they've been caught out near Dunny do the hunt. And the final showdown with the Stockos was spearheaded by the tactical operations Unit. The police that were involved in this investigation, they've done an outstanding job. Ned Kelly's story, why is that? Well, yeah, he's criminal. They had a very lawless time. Almost like outlaws, weren't they when it came to that murder? The worst crime the two ever committed together. Gino just wanted to tie the guy up. You know, Mark's the one who said just shoot him.
- [00:43]
Matthew Tankard
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. I'm not Michelle Laurie. I'm Matthew Tankard, the producer of Australian True Crime. And today we're re releasing episode 53 about father and son fugitives Geno and Mark Stocco. In 2007, the Stockos began what would be an eight year crime spree across multiple states before their eventual capture in 2015. Gino and Mark were ultimately charged with 34 crimes including the murder of 68 year old Rosario Simone. Our guest on today's episode is Nino Bucci, author of the Stockos. Like father, like son. And there's a link to get your copy in the show notes of this episode.
- [01:21]
Michelle Laurie
This is Australian true crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created. The Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. When did you first get involved? Intrigued, smitten by the Stockos, Nino?
- [01:46]
Nino Bucci
So October 2015 was pretty much the first time anybody had heard about them. Yeah, they shot at police, police sort of around Wagga Wagga and that sort of started this, you know, almost two week manhunt. And it was a rare luxury of having this extended period to sort of look into, you know, the backstory of someone. A lot of the time when you're doing crime reporting, as I was at the time, you know, you'll get a case that comes in, you'll have a quick look at it and then they'll get charged. So you can't do too much about their history and what they've been up to and all the rest of it. These guys, because they're on the run for so long and they were doing some really weird stuff while that was happening. You could also sort of look back at, you know, the stuff that had been made public before about their past offending, sort of start weaving a bit of a picture together about how these Two had been on the run for so long and even after doing that and having that sort of extra pew that you normally don't have when you're a crime reporter to look into someone's background, I just knew there must be more to it, and hence the book.
- [02:48]
Michelle Laurie
So, you know that we as readers are fascinated and every day we want to know more. So every day you've got inches, column inches to fill, so you're able to go away and find out a bit more while they're still on the run. So it's giving you these two weeks of time to research and find out more about these intriguing characters. What did you find out? Who are these people?
- [03:09]
Nino Bucci
Yeah, I mean, in that initial sort of period, what became clear is that they had basically been complete recluses, cut off not only from family and friends, but from society as a whole. Given they didn't have any sort of electronic means of banking or, you know, phones for any long period of time. You know, they weren't into social media. They were kind of almost like swagmen, you know, of the type that had been around Australia. And I mean, it was obviously that sort of the thing that captured a lot of people, I think, was the fact they were leading police on a merry dance for whatever reason. I explore that quite a lot in the sort of ensuing years. Australians love when police is kind of made to look like fools. And that's what these guys were doing, you know, for that two week period Now, I think everybody sort of had a little bit of a gasp and were a little bit shocked when they were actually caught. And it turned out that they had committed a murder because up until that point we, we knew they were bad guys. I mean, they'd shot at police and they'd burnt down farms and all this stuff was coming out about the stuff they'd done, but nobody necessarily suspected them of murder. And all the kind of memes and everything that had been going around when they were on the run sort of took a bit of a darker turn probably to explain the iteration of the Stockos, as they came to be sort of known in 2015. You've got to go all the way back to 2006. That was when they were arrested down in Apollo Bay on sort of the southwest coast of Victoria. They'd robbed a yacht club a little bit further west at Port Fairy. They got arrested on this yacht that Geno Stocko had bought as part of the property settlement with his wife, Mark's mum. And they were basically sailing around doing kind of a Bit of a different version, but similar sort of offending as they became known for later on. You know, getting a little bit of work here and there, pilfering things wherever they could. They stole some identities of people, that sort of thing. When they were charged for that crime, those crimes that they got caught for in 2006, they both spent a little bit of time in prison, but were Both out by 2007, sold the yacht, started basically this kind of life of traveling around, doing sort of itinerant farm work. And their work was fantastic. They were renowned as just these really skilled and hard working blokes who were, would turn their hand to anything, could sort of, you know, do the work of basically 10 men and didn't really care about not getting paid for it. You know, they just wanted sort of somewhere to stay, maybe a bit of food. But they also had this incredibly bizarre streak of just losing it at the slightest sort of, you know, hint of something they were disappointed about, but not necessarily in a way that you and I would consider losing it. You know, it's not as if someone would say something to them that immediately sort of, you know, storm off and shout and that would be the end of it. There'd be the dispute and it would be clear they were unhappy, but there'd be nothing that would indicate sort of the level of anger that was sort of burning inside them. And sure enough, that sort of spewed forth in terms of gross acts of vandalism and, you know, slashing and burning everything on certain properties, you know, stealing anything they could find going back in the dead of night. You know, one particularly kind of famous case in burning down huge sections farm that the original owner that they had the gripe with had sold, you know, years earlier. So, you know, they were utterly kind of confounding people. And to sort of look back on that kind of, you know, 15 to almost 20 year history of offending that they'd had together was really interesting. I spoke to some family members, I spoke to people that had known them both. I spoke to people that, you know, who had employed them. I mean, to unpack it, you probably have to look at a number of things, you know, that are kind of as macro and I guess almost abstract as, you know, the paternal sort of side of Italian families, to the more sort of specific stuff like the fact that Mark, even though he was quite social and was doing well at uni and had a girlfriend and had friends, people also sort of thought he was the sort of guy who was easily led, perhaps a little Bit shy, maybe even a little bit simple, even though he was intelligent. And so, you know, it all kind of came together that once that marriage, you know, broke down, Gino sort of came closer to Mark and started spending more time with Mark. While Mark was at university, they started building a house together. Mark describes it himself after they're arrested to, you know, the psychologist that they are sort of speaking to that he basically, for the first time, got a real appreciation of the skill of his father, you know, on that sort of work site. And, you know, within months, Mark had dropped out of university, he'd broken up with a girlfriend. And basically the only thing he was doing was spending time with Gino. And, you know, he committed his first offense within months of Gino moving to Townsville, where he was at uni, sort of rented a surfboard and didn't return. It really sort of odd and quite a quick kind of transformation in a lot of ways. But then no real indication at that early point that 10, 15 years later would be talking about them as murderers either.
- [08:24]
Michelle Laurie
No, but it's kind of outlaw behavior. You know, it's low level, but it's kind of outlaw behavior, isn't it, to take the surfboard and not take it back. And then I can see how that can escalate to, you know, burning down a barn because you don't like the boss of the job and you've had a blue with him about something. Did you get a sense that were they. Would they both be aggrieved and sort of both agree on these retaliatory moves when they had a fight with somebody? Or would it be sort of Gino who said, right, I'm gonna burn down this bloke's barn, and Mark would go along with it?
- [08:56]
Nino Bucci
Or it was certainly Gino who was more likely to have the disputes. He was the guy who had a chip on his shoulder who seemed to, you know, basically be looking for a reason to have an argument with somebody, whether it be about, you know, some of the obscure sort of theories he had about, you know, the world, conspiracy theories, whether it was, you know, he wanted to have a sort of verbal dispute with someone about that or whether it was, you know, something that happened a number of times where he would be meticulous about sort of grooming and caring for this small patch of grass on the property that would, like, directly abut where they were living. And he'd just be almost kind of addicted to caring for this sort of bit of grass and fixated by it. And, you know, the property owner at some point would start to say, look, you know, this is a farm. We can't kind of have this one patch of grass that can't be touched or walked on or that cattle can't sort of graze from. You know, you're gonna need to sort of let us use that, you know, because on some one occasion he erected a fence around this little patch of grass out the front of his, you know, the shed that he was basically living in with Mark.
- [10:01]
Michelle Laurie
Yeah.
- [10:02]
Nino Bucci
And, you know, sure enough, when someone asked him to do that, he'd fly off the handle and say they made a mistake and all the rest of it. And they think, yeah, sure, you know, we've upset him not knowing that somewhere deep inside of him, he'd basically decided to come back and destroy everything he could at a later time. So what is very hard to determine is whether when he had that dispute and he was, you know, by far, and when you look at the history of him, the person who is most likely to have the dispute, it's impossible to know whether when he and Mark were talking about it, Mark egged him on in some way, or whether it was Mark who had actually maybe come up with, in some cases, that the method in which you'd strike back against these people. And one of the most fascinating things, you know, by far, when you kind of look at the dynamics between the two and the influence of Gina over Mark, one of the things that I really still can't completely understand is when it came to that murder, you know, the worst crime the two ever committed together, Gino just wanted to tie the guy up. You know, Mark's the one who said, just shoot him.
- [11:06]
Michelle Laurie
Wow.
- [11:07]
Nino Bucci
And grabbed the gun and gave it to his dad and, you know, that was it. So what that all means about the dynamic between the two, I don't know. And whether that was just an anomaly or a bit of an indicator that the whole way along Mark was playing a bit of a greater role than people give him credit for. I don't know.
- [11:23]
Michelle Laurie
So he's never spoken to the psychologists or whatever since their arrest about the influence that his dad had over his behaviour changing. He's never blamed his dad.
- [11:34]
Nino Bucci
The way he sort of describes it is just basically that they drew in closer together and that, you know, his father helped him understand, you know, what they described as the system which was, you know, the method of living whereby you took what you needed to take from people to survive. That's the only sort of thing he says about it. There's certainly nothing sort of reflective in there about the fact that that was a bad thing, you know, and that before that point he was going fine. And there's certainly nothing to indicate that up until that point there was anything about, you know, his childhood or his upbringing. There was anything other than, you know, fine, normal and really solid and kind of not influenced at all by the fact that during that whole kind of upbringing, Gino was regarded in Ingham in North Queensland, where they grew up, as a petty, crooked someone who couldn't be trusted. Someone who is, you know, just a local kind of ne' er do well of the types that are in, you know, every country town in Australia, you know. But that didn't seem to have had any influence on Mark for whatever reason. He was not either. Either wasn't aware of it at all or was protected enough from it that he didn't make any reference to that in any of the sort of interviews with police or psychologists or, or even talking to, you know, family and friends that I was able to speak to as part of my research that sort of indicated that he found that to be burdensome. There's a sister and she's still in North Queensland. Got a family, completely sort of a clean skin and was a victim of kind of lower level offending of the pair as well. Certainly not as much of a victim as her mother, Gino's wife, Connie. Some of the offences that they committed against her that I sort of was able to uncover as part of my research for this were pretty disturbing when they were in a relationship from people who sort of knew them. It does seem like Gino is quite controlling, you know, with money and with what he expected Connie to be doing. Connie was regarded in Ingham and still is. You know, she's still got really good friends up there as just a, you know, really friendly, bubbly and, you know, vibrant kind of member of that community. And she's married to this guy who's regarded as, you know, a bit of a local pest slash crook slash, you know, someone you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw after they separated. This is. That's something that obviously had a huge impact on, you know, Gino behavior getting worse. And, you know, the crimes that they committed against Connie included some pretty sort of, you know, horrible prank phone calls, you know, breaking into a house, sticking up these sort of vulgar posters around town with photos of her and all the rest of it. Just down in Werribee actually, where she'd sort of moved, you know, relocated after the separation. And you know, the worst of the offenses was, you know, Mark actually robbing her at a supermarket in. Where it'd be basically dragging her to the ground by a handbag while Gino sort of waited in a stolen car not that long afterward after, you know, the sort of drawn back in together as well, you know, in a matter of sort of four or five years. And I think that is actually I had to sort of appreciate, I suppose, how Gino maybe had even weaponized that separation as something to sort of draw Mark closer into him. You know, badmouthing his mother all the time, saying the property settlement wasn't fair. That was something, you know, that in hindsight he was using very deliberately to get Mark on his side and to get Mark to understand his way of, you know, doing things and his sort of philosophy, I guess, about crime. So much so that, yeah, Mark, you know, robbed his own mother in the supermarket. But the really bizarre bit about that, you know, quite violent robbery is that, you know, only a week or two before Mark had actually tracked down his mum in another supermarket in the area, not that same supermarket, and given her a hug and told her that he wanted, you know, them to all be a family again. You know, he was just obviously really disturbed, really confused about the whole situation.
- [15:45]
Michelle Laurie
Yeah.
- [15:46]
Nino Bucci
But only at that point felt that he could spend any time with Gino.
- [16:01]
Michelle Laurie
If you'd like to talk to someone about abuse that's taken place in your life, no matter how long ago it happened, your GP is always a good place to start. If that's not going to work for you, you can contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or via their website, 1-800-Respect.org au or you can call Lifeline's 24 hour phone counselling service or on 13, 11, 14.
- [16:33]
Nino Bucci
The difficulty we've got with all this is that even though there's reams of sort of interviews they've done, you know, with psychologists, with police, I spoke to as many people as I possibly could who knew them. Gino particularly is just someone who's, you know, who lies without thinking. You know, he is one of those unique sort of crooks that it's impossible to unpack whether he even knows it's a lie anymore or whether he's so convinced that anything he says is the truth that he's completely separated from it. He couldn't tell you one way or another whether what he's saying is the truth or a lie because he just utterly believes what he's saying. So we've kind of got to separate out Anything he said in any of those interviews about what the reasons were for his offending, what he did, what he didn't do. I mean, he says in one of those interviews that he barely drank. Now, I know from speaking to a lot of people that on occasion he did have problems with, you know, getting too drunk and lashing out at people. So I don't think that there was any indication, you know, sort of drugs played a part. I think what. What it sort of tells us is that when you've got two people who think so much alike and spend so much time with each other and with nobody else, that's an incredibly dangerous thing.
- [17:52]
Michelle Laurie
They were finally done in 2007, right? Well, they were actually released in 2007 after doing a stint for robbery and criminal damage. And that seems to have really sort of served to isolate them, doesn't it? To really bind them and isolate them.
- [18:08]
Nino Bucci
Yeah, yeah, that's that. Yacht club burglary. Yeah. And after that they sold the yacht. Yeah, they. That little period there is actually an interesting one because it was. Mark was out on his own and Gino was still in prison, just for a couple of months, but long enough for, you know, if Mark was going to make a clean break that he could have. I've got no indication of what he was doing that period of time where he was. There's little periods like that throughout their whole sort of story that no matter how many people I spoke to and how many sort of records I checked over, it was really impossible to tell where they were at any given time. But that certainly was a period where Mark was out, Gino was inside. But after that, they sold the yacht. They started this kind of process of finding work on places, spending as much time there as they could until they either sort of fell out with the owner or just decided to move on. But it didn't really get super bad until 2011. 2007 to 2011, they were still committing relatively serious offenses, but. But it was. You know, it was the minor property damage, the stealing, the sort of. Some of the sort of. The lesser stuff, I guess, compared to what they'd go on to do. But from sort of 2011 on to when they were caught in October 2015, things really escalated, and it's very hard to know why, but that's when they committed these acts which they. Which Mark described as vengeful acts. You know, there's these four big fires that they lit that Mark would describe later on as the ones that were particularly sort of vengeful. And they all sort of occurred in that period. Obviously a murder occurred in that period. The shooting at police occurred in that period.
- [19:51]
Michelle Laurie
Terrifying.
- [19:52]
Nino Bucci
So it's sort of hard to know why that was kind of the step up, because it's not entirely accurate to sort of say that it was linear before that point. It's not as if it sort of went from, you know, like a, a kind of petty theft up to murder over like a 10 year period. And there was a gradual escalation. The whole time was kind of like four years of sort of like, yeah, up, but sort of stable. And then four years of just going utterly ballistic with that murder being the peak at the end.
- [20:23]
Michelle Laurie
Well, tell us about the murder. Where was where and why?
- [20:26]
Nino Bucci
So the murder occurred in the context of basically Gino getting named as part of this operation called Operation Rome. The AFP do it every year. They get nominations from the state police forces about the most wanted people. You know, there's usually some really sort of heavy hitters in there. This particular year, by coincidence, it was Queensland's year to sort of coordinate it. So they were able to have a bit more input. And Gino was one of the people that were nominated. And so, I mean, it's a bit of a misconception that they were on Australia's most Wanted. They weren't, but. But this list is usually called Australia's Most Wanted and Gino was on it. Mark wasn't. But there was a lot of press at that time in general about the fact that here's this sort of 50 something year old guy from Queensland has been committing a lot of nasty property crimes. He's on this huge list. All of a sudden his photo is out there and there was a bit more sort of known about the level of offending he'd done. What that meant was that even though they'd been traveling around with false names, they'd typically sort of not given any bank details or anything like that that allowed them to be tracked. But it meant that people knew what his face was and that he committed lots of offences against farmers before. So it sort of drove him underground.
- [21:46]
Michelle Laurie
That's really stressful if you're that dedicated to being underground and to sort of
- [21:51]
Nino Bucci
really sort of hammer that home. At that exact point that list came out, they were living in this property right on the edge of southwestern Sydney. So you know, literally the edge of the city boundary, this beautiful place just sort of outside of Wedderburn. And they'd been there a couple of times over sort of a two year period. The owners loved them, they loved the work they did, they had a really great relationship with Mark. The woman there was kind of like had a really sort of maternal relationship with Mark and they'd sort of help them renovate their property, clean up the place. They'd sort of. This couple had sort of taken a bit of a tree change and Mark and Gino had basically helped them do all the building. But then when this list came out, they had to, they couldn't have them there anymore, so they kicked them out. Gino and Mark had met a guy working on that same property a few months earlier and he was a bricklayer. Had links in with Italian organized crime, but not serious links, more sort of peripheral and familial and links that just happened to know people that were involved in the Calabrian mafia. This guy offered Mark and Gino to stay at his property after the list came out. They soon crossed paths with another bloke who also had sort of mafia links called Rosario Simone. There was going to. That sort of group, that kind of old hands of kind of mafia linked people were in the process of setting up a property in western New South Wales to grow marijuana. And that said they were in the process of setting up another house. Right at the very time that Mark and Gino went into that orbit. Yeah. So they thought, well, these are two blokes that can do pretty much anything that you need to lay low and that, you know, basically don't have a choice other than to say yes, let's invite them out to this property. And I mean, you only have to think about that scenario to realize how fraud it is. Here it is, you know, two guys that have basically got in disputes and destroyed the property. Everybody that they've dealt with for the past sort of decade, dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are forced into growing marijuana with a bunch of sort of aging crooks at a super isolated property in the middle of western New South Wales. Yeah, it was never going to end well.
- [24:06]
Michelle Laurie
I know, but I guess the crooks are so arrogant because they're thinking we're the Calabrians, what can, what are they going to do? They're going to do what we tell them to do, aren't they?
- [24:14]
Nino Bucci
I think it was probably more pragmatism and arrogance. I mean they have just got constantly got these little things on the go. I mean the fascinating thing about this group of, you know, aging kind of mafia link people that were doing it is that they'd had convictions dating back 30 years for cultivating marijuana. And only a year before this one happened, one of them had actually electrocuted himself and died trying to set up a little hydro set up in a shed, you know, in. In western Sydney, not far from where the Stockos were living at the time. So they basically just couldn't shake the habit. And it was something that just happened every few months to kind of keep the money ticking over. So anyway, they get to this property, Pine Vale, out in near Dunnydoo in western New South Wales, and you know, almost immediately the arguments kind of start. They're about things like the way that Rosario drove the tractor. Gino thought that he was, you know, buggering up the gears. They were about the tanks and the fact that Gino didn't felt he was getting enough credit for the way they were installed. They were about everything and anything. And when you're talking about a property that is that isolated. And by that time, even though it was only spring was getting super hot out there, 30, 40 degree days, the pressure just kind of built. And Mark and Gino had been kicked off so many properties in the past, they knew they didn't have much choice other than to accept this offer from these guys to, you know, sit this dope crop out in the middle of nowhere. Eventually, Rosario basically got. He sort of started to threaten to go back to Sydney and talk to the people that had set up the house to kick them off. So he's packed his bags, he's got in his car, he's head down the sort of dirt road to leave the house, you know, these to sort of paint a bit more of a picture of the property. Backs onto a state forest. There's nothing else around it. The road literally ends at the front gate to this property. That's it. He hairs back down, you know, away from the house to go to the gate and finds it locked. And so he has to come back to the house to, you know, get the key off Mark and Gino. And that's when, you know, Mark and Gino go back inside the house, you know, ostensibly to look for the key, but they're actually discussing killing him. And basically I come back out, they had a shotgun from under the bed that stolen from a farmer in western Queensland sort of months earlier. And Gino basically walks out and shoots him twice just on the dirt outside the property.
- [26:47]
Michelle Laurie
Gosh, I had no idea that the person they murdered was a Calabrian mafia dude.
- [26:53]
Nino Bucci
Yeah, I mean that takes balls. The thing about it was is that they didn't necessarily appreciate the links that he had.
- [27:01]
Michelle Laurie
Right.
- [27:01]
Nino Bucci
And the links that he had depending on who you talk to as well, could have been as simple as they all went to the same Calabrian social club in Western Sydney, which is enough
- [27:12]
Michelle Laurie
of a link for me to be.
- [27:14]
Nino Bucci
Or it could be that he was someone who had. Had basically had a lot to do with that particular sort of milieu for 30, 40 years. I mean, he was one of the crooks that was released by the very crooked corrections minister, Rex Jackson, back in either the 80s or the 90s. He was one of the first ones that had actually paid off the corrections minister to get parole in this huge scandal that eventually claimed the minister's sort of scalp. But I think that's fairly revealing about his kind of power or at least the people he knew at that time. But I mean they, I think were just so desperate, Mark and Gino and they, they talk about it at some length in the sort of interviews that they gave, you know, after the murder that they just felt the wall sort of closing in. And they, they also sort of thought, I think and this goes to A, premeditation, B their kind of absolute pragmatism when it came to, you know, some of the offenses they committed, other offenses they committed, there was no reason for doing it at all other than the fact they hated the person. But with certain offences they were very much driven by what they saw as the logical thing to do to them. They thought, this guy's an old bloke who's got no family and is growing marijuana in the middle of nowhere. We're gonna be able to get away with this, or if we don't get away with it, then we're at least gonna be able to get away with it for long enough that we're gonna be far away from this place before anyone knows about it. And so they killed him, loaded his body into Trevor Uten, sort of drove it out, you know, a few hundred meters away from the farm and. Or the farmhouse, left it there, packed their stuff and left the property pretty much.
- [29:00]
Michelle Laurie
And did they? I guess they did have a great head start. Where'd they go? What happened?
- [29:05]
Nino Bucci
So this nine day period is just fascinating to me because there's nine days from where they. Between where they kill Rosario Simone and where they're basically located on driving through a town called Henty in New South Wales. And just unlucky in the sense that a police car is going past them with one of those automatic number plate recognition. They scan number plates in like a fraction of a second. They find that, you know, that Ute that just drove past them has actually got plates and not belonging to like a hatchback sedan, knows it's not right, flicks on the sirens, does a ue and it's on from that point. You know, the stockos basically get pursued for a few K's, then they shoot at police, then they shoot at police again. And, you know, by that night they're national fugitives because when they eventually were caught, they ended up pleading guilty to the murder. That meant there was probably not as extensive a questioning as there would have been otherwise. And so detectives that questioned about that murder, I spoke to them for the book. They did ask them what they were doing in that period between the murder and being, you know, shooting at police, basically. And they just said, oh, we were just camping around, we were doing bits and pieces. But I mean, logic tells you that I must have gone to one of the many places they had across the entire country that were just jam packed with things that stolen, you know, and things like gas bottles and, you know, long life food and guns and just general kind of camping equipment. And they must have gone there and laid low for a little bit. I certainly haven't found any evidence at all that sort of suggests, you know, the path they went or, or anything like that or indeed what they're sort of planning on doing. And it's just, I just find it staggering that, you know, they basically drove up to this intersection and if they had turned, if they'd gone straight or if they turned left, that number plate recognition thing may not have got them, but they turned right and went directly towards this police car.
- [31:14]
Michelle Laurie
Have they ever mentioned where they were headed? Did they have a plan? They've never.
- [31:17]
Nino Bucci
No, no, nothing. I think they potentially were gonna follow the path that they'd done a long time, which is basically just driving north to south up and down that whole east coast. And they may have had some sort of loose idea about some safe places they could go, but I think they were probably hoping to try and lay low. I mean, the other thing that's quite incongruous about them getting caught then, as we know that they generally like to travel at night. So I think there's a chance that basically by the time of the police detecting him at that point, that they just got so desperate that they weren't really sure what their plans were. I also think it's possible that they were trying to go back up to Pinevale. I think that they thought in their minds, the fact that nothing had came out publicly about that murder was that maybe that property was gonna be safe for them. So that's possible, given they were generally sort of traveling north. I think there's some indication that in this sort of nine day period they were going around to caravan parks, which is one of their favorite sort of places because they'd drill holes in the washing machines and steal all the coins. I don't think they nicked a car in that nine day period. But soon after shooting at police, they stole the white Land Cruiser which became this sort of famous chariot.
- [32:32]
Michelle Laurie
Oh yeah.
- [32:33]
Nino Bucci
Sort of going back the other way after, you know, they've killed someone to try and unpick. How it got to that point was, was also sort of fascinating.
- [32:41]
Michelle Laurie
And then, and then actually when I realized how scary they were, when I started to think about, you know, being on your farm and having a fight with this guy who was there as a workman and then waking up in the middle of the night because your farm's on fire. It's like, oh God. Actually they are really properly terrifying. So tell us what happened in the two weeks. So police chase, shooting at police, you know, could very nearly have murdered police as well, but luckily didn't. What happened in those two weeks? While you're madly filing stories about who
- [33:12]
Nino Bucci
these people are, they basically did these huge sort of loops from a sort of period, I guess from like the Yarra Valley in Melbourne and then south and east as far as like Bairnsdale and then back north again around like the Snowies and like past Aubrey Slash, Wangaratta, all the rest of it and back down again. Like it looks like they're basically doing this huge kind of like loops, ovals in this fairly vast section of, I guess southeastern Australia. They spent a lot of time, it appears, kind of on tracks around, you know, the mountains, you know, because they obviously knew that that was more isolated, more hilly, more tree cover. There was some really sort of odd stuff that that went on. I mean, the police in Victoria were convinced at one point they hadn't surrounded near kind of Glenburn in the Yarra ranges. And they managed to find their way out. You know, they went straight through this kind of roadblock. And even after they went through the roadblock, police like, yep, no, we still have got them because we know we've got further up that road covered. But they managed to go, you know, they think, down a little fire track. I mean there was a lot that sort of went on during that period that as the public didn't necessarily know, but that I've kind of been able to find out since, such as, you know, the contingency plans are developing about arresting them when they went to, like, a servo or a public toilet. You know, the fact that Mark at one point stopped at Shepparton Library to check the Internet and read about themselves, you know, the fact that those guys were actually arguing quite a lot amongst themselves about whether to give up or not, you know, which was interesting in the context of, you know, before that there not being any indication they were anything other than, you know, on the same page.
- [34:57]
Michelle Laurie
Cause were they sleeping? I imagine they weren't sleeping and they were just driving continually.
- [35:01]
Nino Bucci
Yeah, I don't think they were sleeping a great deal that first sort of night after they shot at police, they basically went. They dumped the ute they were in, they went across country, they dumped one of the guns as well. And they sort of hid in this creek bed and probably looked like they were watching this guy called Paul Rogers, who was pretty much driving up and down his lane. Cause he's got huge property there and it was bin day and he'd collect, was collecting all the bins. He took off and then came back, parked his ute behind his property, you know, left the keys in it, left a wallet in it, like, you know, every sort of farmer and then woke up the next morning and it was gone. And he's pretty sure that the Stockos were watching him the whole time because he was going along this road that was right next to a kind of dry creek. And anyway, that became the kind of car they used. And I mean, another one of the things that was amazing that happened is there was at one point they just randomly kind of got pulled over kind of even closer to, like, Calais country, around sort of Glenrowan way by the police. But they didn't think it was them. You know, they'd made some slight sort of modifications to the ute, putting like one of those little, like, flashing lights on that, you know, roadworks people had. They were in high vis, the number plate was different. So police have pulled them over, thinking, oh, you know, we'll just have a chat to these people. They managed to back into the police car to, like, perfectly so that the police car's disabled and then take off. And even then the police thought, no, we've still got them surrounded. Like, we know where they are. There's no way out of this. But they were completely gone. I mean, police in Victoria now, sort of looking back on it, say that, you know, we did everything we could. There was a huge amount of resources. We wouldn't necessarily change anything. And we feel that it was effective because that Pressure was building on them, and that was part of the whole focus of the operation. I mean, it was the biggest manhunt that the state had ever seen. You know, in terms of sheer sort of numbers of resources.
- [36:55]
Michelle Laurie
There was definitely a sense, I remember that they could still kill someone because we knew they were armed, they were tired, they were desperate. And that. That idea of them kind of laying in wait, watching a dude in his ute, there was definitely a sense that they could have shot the guy to get his and stuff like that. So in the community, there was a sense of fear.
- [37:12]
Nino Bucci
Yeah. And I think what wasn't completely appreciated then, and something I only sort of came to realize later on, was that they had dozens of victims out there, and every single one of those people must have been absolutely beside themselves that they were going to come past, because they just had this incredible memory about all the properties that worked on. I mean, hence their fantastic knowledge of the landscape that helped them sort of evade the police. But you must have just been petrified that, you know, you were going to hear the gravel, you know, crunching outside your window one night, and it was going to be them. And sure enough, what they did do was go back to a property that they'd been at before, Pinevale, and that's. That was their undoing.
- [37:55]
Michelle Laurie
What happened?
- [37:56]
Nino Bucci
Well, so they went. They decided that the best place for them to go, the place where they knew there was food, they knew there was fuel, they knew it was isolated, was Pinevale, you know, where they'd killed Rosario, you know, a couple of weeks earlier, and where they were hoping they'd be safe. And so they started sort of making their way up there. And they didn't just sort of drive, you know, straight up the driveway and lock the gate behind them and hope for the best. They basically started camping in the forest behind it for a little bit, the Goonur Forest. And they were camping there, you know, doing the stuff they normally did to sort of evade detection. Hessian bags on the roof so it couldn't be seen from the air. Flip the tailgate down so you couldn't see the number plate. And a park ranger came past and sort of saw them and thought, these guys look familiar, but was also unarmed, out of mobile range, didn't have a radio, and so basically just took off out of there as quickly as he could. As soon as he got into rage, called the police, they came back in and saw the Stocko sort of packing up the fire, was gone out, but saw enough to sort of think this probably was them. Given that the closest property to them at that point was Pinevale. And at that same time, there'd been a couple of little bits of intelligence come in about Rosario being missing, about the Stockos having worked at a property in the general area, and even about, you know, concerns about the ownership of Pinevale, given that there were some links to the Calabrian mafia, The police had started to piece together the possibility that at one point the Stockos had been working at a property in the region. So combining that with the sighting, they were fairly sure that that's where they'd gone. And so they basically, you know, the police sort of moved in. They watched that house for about 16 hours before they sort of saw the Stockos. You know, when one of the officers, who was a great help to me, a detective in Ingham, who spent, you know, a lot of time trying to catch them, basically because they were, you know, locals, even though they'd sort of traveled a lot since then, he sort of took it as a bit of a personal affront, I guess, that they were from his patch and were causing so much havoc. And after they got arrested and were in prison in New South Wales, sort of awaiting trial, not trial, but awaiting the. The finalization of the murder charge, he went down and interviewed them and he put it to them, you know, were you guys in a relationship? You know, was there more sort of going on to this? And Mark flatly denied it. And Gino got really upset and basically said, you know, everybody's, you know, very jealous of the special relationship I had with my son. So who knows what that actually meant? But, you know, they did plead guilty very early on. Another detective I spoke to's theory about that is that they wanted to be able to have their court process finished as quickly as possible, because once that's finished, you can share a cell with a co accused. Yet another sort of very strange thing about these guys is that they appeared to love prison and were fantastic model prisoners. You know, they were as renowned for their fantastic work inside prison as they were renowned for their incredible work on farms. Basically, they sort of took it to cleaning up urinals without being asked. They helped, like, paint, you know, buildings.
- [41:16]
Michelle Laurie
Okay.
- [41:17]
Nino Bucci
They sort of went about getting qualifications. Mark got a qualification in printing. I mean, there was a. There was a few indications, particularly with Gino, that he was finding it a little bit trickier. You know, he tried to talk the prison chaplain into making a phone call to his daughter to ask about, you know, both his parents died when he was in prison. At one point got really sort of frightened when he asked a guard to come into his room to turn off the tv, and the guard actually came in, he sort of bolted to the back of the room and sort of cowered. So there were some indications that he was finding it harder. But in terms of their behaviour, they were. It actually describes them in the reports from New South Wales Corrective Services as model prisoners.
- [42:01]
Michelle Laurie
If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org AU. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13 yarn.org a.
- [42:33]
Nino Bucci
The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.