When the cane farmers of Queensland pushed back against the mob

Anthony LaPaglia first heard about mafia extortion taking place in Queensland cane fields in the 1930s during a casual conversation with screenwriter Adam Grossetti.

“I met Adam, some years ago, at some party… and he said that he wants to do this project, Black Hand. He gave me a very brief pitch on it and I said, ‘When you have something in writing, send it to me, and I’ll read it.’ A few years later -because these things take time- he sent it to me, and I read it and I was really fascinated with it because it’s part of Australian history I wasn’t even aware about,” he tells TV Tonight.

The result is a 3 part series, The Black Hand, an Italian organised crime gang, which delves back in time to explore an Australian Italian community’s struggles against extortion, arson, kidnap, mayhem and murder by Italian criminals targeting their migrant countrymen in Australia’s deep north.

“Even though it involves my people, I didn’t really know about the cane cutters of Far North Queensland. Even though my dad and his two brothers did a little bit of it, when they first moved out to Australia in the ’50s,” he continues.

“They did a bit of sugar cane, they did hurricane fencing in the Northern Territory, they worked on the Myponga dam. Wherever they could get work they did it.”

LaPaglia, who is both presenter and co-producer, travels to both Far North Queensland and Calabria, Italy to learn about mafiosa roots which took hold in centres around the town of Ingham. The Black Hand also operated from Ayr, Mossman (near Port Douglas) and Innisfail.

“It’s pretty big out there. I can’t imagine what it was like in the 1930s. There’s a lot of space between each farm and the towns and the farm. It’s not easy to get to any of them,” he explains.

“It’s almost comical that they went out there to extort money, but that’s what they did. The mafia guys ran the brothels and the gambling, so extortion was just a side job to keep the other hustles going.

“I think the farmers thought, ‘We’re not going to put up with this time. We’re gonna fight back.’ It’s that simple. They felt more, I guess. emboldened to do it.. .to take them on. Because these guys are out of their element. They’re not in Calabria anymore.”

The series is creatively shot by Nick Paton ACS and directed by Kriv Stenders.

“That was one of the other big reasons I wanted to do it, because I love his work. If I hadn’t known the person that was filming and directing it I might have had a different response to it. But the quality of his stuff is always pretty high. I felt like he would do something interesting with it and he did.,” says LaPaglia.

LaPaglia, who maintains that the mafia changed in more recent times, adopting a “charm offensive” rather than strong arm tactics.

“I think that their their mission statement may have changed. I think what’s happened is that a lot of these guys -because it happened here too- a lot of the old school decided that it was not going to stay productive for too much longer. After John Gotti in the ’90s it looked like a losing proposition. I’ve come to understand that a lot of these guys educated their kids and as their kids take up prominent roles in the legal profession or politics. They became more educated and kind of fit into the mainstream a bit more. But I don’t know if they’ve completely left their old ways behind.”

He adds, “By the 1940s, I think that the farmers had kind of got them out. They’d successfully stopped them. But you know, the mafia has a way of always being there, no matter what.”

The Black Hand screens 8:30pm Tuesday on ABC.