The former state secretary of the Transport Workers Union was commenting on revelations that Australian Federal Police are re-investigating claims that Mafia-linked businessmen donated about $100,000 to the Liberal Party in order to prevent an alleged Mafia figure, Francesco Madafferi, from being deported.

It was an easy free kick for Hutchins but given Labor's history, it could turn into an own goal.

First, the Liberals. In late 2005 Madafferi was due to be sent back to Italy by the then immigration minister Philip Ruddock because he was an illegal immigrant suspected of Mafia involvement.

According to an investigation by The Age, in late 2003 three Sydney Italian businessman - Pat Sergi, Tony Labbozzetta and Nick Scali - saw the NSW Liberal senator Marise Payne about assisting the Melbourne-based Madafferi to obtain a visa. Payne contacted the office of the then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone twice to discuss Madafferi's visa case. In 2005 Vanstone allowed Madafferi to stay on humanitarian grounds. Last August Madafferi was arrested over his alleged involvement in the world's largest ecstasy bust but is yet to face trial.

Payne and Vanstone deny knowledge of donations by Madafferi's friends and relatives and Payne says her meeting with Scali, Sergi and Labbozzetta had nothing to do with the promise of donations.

Seemingly unknown to Hutchins was that the three men who visited Payne have far closer links to the ALP. The furniture tsar Nick Scali was once a business partner of the controversial ALP powerbroker Eddie Obeid. Joe Tripodi, as an MP, had shares in Pat Sergi's company, which bought and sold government land. And long-time head of the Marconi Club, Tony Labbozzetta - who was the subject of a damning report into Soccer Australia - was twice appointed to the Immigration Review Tribunal by then federal immigration minister Nick Bolkus, despite an advisory committee recommending against his reappointment. Bolkus gave him a second five-year term in 1994 even though he had heard only four cases in the previous five years while other tribunal members heard hundreds.

A confidential police report produced a decade earlier had named two of Antonio Labbozzetta's relatives as suspected Mafia figures.

Labbozzetta's first cousin Frank, described as "Il Capo" in the South Australian Parliament, worked closely on immigration matters with the late federal immigration minister Al Grassby, who was himself accused of having close links to the Griffith Mafia.

According to the police report, while he was employed as an ethnic adviser to the late NSW Labor minister Eric Bedford, Labbozzetta's business card was found among the papers of Bruno Brizzi who had been arrested in the early '80s over a $6 million marijuana crop near Bourke.

As planning and environment minister, Bob Carr was lobbied by Obeid, then a property developer, about problems Obeid's company was having with the National Parks and Wildlife Service over a proposed development in the snowfields.

In 1988, a fortnight after Obeid met with Carr, Scali donated $1000 to Carr's personal campaign. Carr later said he did not know Scali had any interest in the development. Scali and Carr denied the donation was in any way improper. Scali had also donated $1000 to the Liberals, which they had not declared.

While Carr may not have been aware of Scali's involvement, his predecessor in the planning portfolio, Eric Bedford, did.

Documents obtained by the Herald show Bedford and Labbozzetta lobbied the parks service on Scali's proposed development at Perisher. "Mr Labbozzetta indicated that a certain development (Mr Scali's) required 'rezoning' in Perisher Valley to allow it to proceed," wrote Bruce Leaver, regional director of the service.

Leaver documented Bedford's approach to him saying: "The minister again raised the Scali issue, pointing to 'political problems'."

Leaver also said, "The implementation of the Scali venture would lay the minister and the service wide open to charges of inconsistency regarding the plan of political favouritism to specific vested interests."

In December 1987 Frank Labbozzetta was interviewed by NSW police: "Would you care to tell us if you had any suspicions or knowledge of Mr Bedford receiving large amounts of money for development approvals or rezoning applications?"

"No, no suspicions at all," replied Labbozzetta, who also denied he received money or benefits on Bedford's behalf.

Accompanying Frank Labbozzetta to the interview was the solicitor Steve Masselos, long-time lawyer to ALP identities Graham Richardson and Lionel Murphy.

At the time of the interview, Labbozzetta's wife, Luiga, was in business with Masselos's wife, Anita. Their company, Capolab, had purchased a $500,000 property at Badgerys Creek, in Sydney's west, which was on-sold two years later making a million-dollar profit.

Franco Labbozzetta was also close to the controversial Grassby, travelling to Italy with him on several occasions and successfully lobbying on behalf of several Italians who had been denied visas to enter Australia.

Grassby was convicted of criminal defamation, overturned on appeal, for having organised publication of a document trying to exonerate the Mafia from the death of Griffith resident Donald Mackay by suggesting his own family was responsible for his murder. The same document, written on government-issue paper, was found when police raided crime boss Bob Trimbole's house in 1983.

In 1987 an NCA officer, Bruce Provost, told a Sydney court that Trimbole had given Grassby $20,000 before and $20,000 after the document was published in The Sun-Herald in August 1980.

According to the 1979 report of the Woodward royal commission into drug trafficking, another of those linked to Trimbole was a real estate agent, Pat Sergi, 63, who is now a Sydney property developer and charity director, and one of the three men who lobbied Payne over Madafferi.

Described in the commission as a money launderer for Trimbole, Sergi told the inquiry he believed Trimbole's unexplained wealth came from his wins at punting. Trimbole, who fled the country in 1981, left on a ticket bought from Marconi Travel, owned by Tony Labbozzetta and his family.

Between 1996 and 2000, when Joe Tripodi was an up and coming NSW Labor MP, he was a shareholder in Sergi's company Westside Property Developments, which bought and sold government land.

Pat Sergi and Nick Scali were singled out for praise in the former MP Reba Meagher's maiden speech and it was at Sergi's Star Of The Sea development, at Terrigal, where the then Labor Opposition leader Mark Latham holidayed during the height of the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami crisis.

Given Labor's connections with the people linked to the current allegations of cash for visas, it will be interesting to see how much pressure they can put on the Liberals.

As one Liberal insider quipped this week: "Let them start throwing rocks because our files are bigger than theirs."